Downvotes are already a questionable design choice, which encourage passive-aggressive drive-by behaviour rather than engaging with and countering challenging ideas. They’re kind of a dark feature, which give the user a sense of participation, or worse, the sense of being a cop, while contributing nothing.

They are catharsis without praxis, and they almost certainly contribute to online toxicity.

Actually giving them forum or site moderation power is… Well, it sure is doubling down on that feeling like a cop thing.

And what are all cops?

I think you make a valid point, in the sense that, ideally, there would be some way for objectively anti-social and toxic content to be removed by the force of popular opinion. However, the trouble is that we can’t trust anyone in particular to be the flawless arbiter of such a standard. Mods do their best, or do what they like, but they can be wrong, power-tripping, or simply confused, etc. The masses or people in general also do their best, or do what they like, but likewise can be wrong, power-tripping, or simply confused, etc. Popular opinion cannot always be counted on to go the right way. There are many situations where what is popular is actually deeply disturbed and irrational. The best that we can do in the current social media landscape, is to choose the mods that we trust the most, or at least distrust the least, join their instances, rely on them to do the basics of keeping garbage out of our feeds, and report or block whatever remains that they don’t catch by the time we see it.

I personally chose to block UniversalMonk after checking out their profile just now, because apparently this person thinks that Luigi Mangione is a scumbag. Maybe there’s a wave of additional UniversalMonks that I will find over time, and I can block those as well. Is it tedious? Sure. But it’s not like I’ve found an instance that is both capable and willing to handle that for me, so it becomes my job.

Others in this thread have made valid points as well, as to why using downvotes as a form of control isn’t a good idea.

I personally think that using downvotes to mean “disagree” is not necessarily a misuse or abuse of downvoting. But it often is. It’s complicated.

The purpose of up and down voting is to indicate how viewers feel about content. You aren’t going to be able to combat “bad-faith actors” with a downvoting algorithm that wouldn’t be better solved by outright blocking or banning temporarily or permanently. Lemmy is FOSS, you can’t stop people from making an instance, but you can defederate.

What instances are you referring to?

No that’s a horrible idea. It should be up to the Admins and Mods to decide what speech is allowed in their instances and communities. Making downvotes have a negative effect would only encourage bad actors to create accounts solely to downvote people, which will in turn create a black market of buying downvotes, to censor post you don’t like, and upvotes, to up censor votes you like.

This agricultural industry around farming accounts to downvote would overwhelm the Admins with account applications. People could also create instances for se sole purpose of making downvoting bot accounts. You might say those instances could be blocked. True, they would. But this could go from bad to worse considering that this could open the door to instance Admins themselves doing downvote based censorship, since they can create has many accounts as they want.

Also, I fell like this is relevant:

The whole point of the Fediverse is since we all want different things from our social media and people will always disagree on something, it is better to have different independent instances, which federate and defederate to create a nice environment for all. People who disagree on something (like whether nsfw content or curse words should be allowed) so much to the point of ruining their experience, they can just go to instances where that content is blocked, instead of spending an eternity arguing over it. This allows for diversity of thought and opinion over the whole system.

I had no idea u/UniversalMonk@lemm.ee even existed lol. Congratulations u/SelfProgrammed@lemmy.today, you just advertised this guy’s account to who knows how many people.

redditors take advantage of downvotes to suppress and brigade unpopular opinions; if a multi-million dollar organization staffed by government and privateers like reddit is powerless to stop this, there no hope for a group of volunteers on a shoe-string budget to do any better.

It does do something? It orders how comments and posts appear in the hot sorting algo. That’s good enough imo

Downvotes in their current form are already used by bigots to anonymously silence marginalised voices (this is the reason why queer instances like hexbear or blahaj lemmy have them disabled). It shouldn’t need explaining why making it possible to essentially temp-ban users without any moderator oversight is a horrific idea.

Go back to reddit.

The thing we can do is defederate. You can talk to your admins about regular interactions with problematic users on specific instances and see where it goes. If it’s a specific community in general, you can report it to that instance’s admins (something I’ve done that resulted in getting a pedo community removed). This is how you “punish” instances and communities that refuse to enforce good user conduct.

But more broadly, I don’t support downvoting in general, because that leads to lazy commentary and brigading behavior. No thanks. I enjoy being on an instance without downvotes, and I am not interested in a system where “the mob” decides what is valid or invalid, acceptable or reprehensible. Mobs are stupid and gullible.

Ultimately, you need to stop thinking about Lemmy as a single community. We can do what we need to do as users, mods, or admins to protect each instance, but what makes the whole thing good and healthy is the tentative agreement between each part to operate in good faith. It’s not our job to decide what “health” is for all of Lemmy/the Fediverse, and the minute it becomes that, what makes the Fediverse great will have been lost to the thing it despises: centralized authority.

Shouldn’t this be up to the mods of a community and not votes, which can be manipulated or misused?

Score is relative though. On hexbear we have downvotes disabled. This means we can not down vote but also means down votes do not federate.

Studies have shown that down votes actually have a large psychological impact negatively on the user. Down votes are frankly unproductive. They might also encourage bad behavior, because if your goal is to stir the pot then down votes are a great indicator that it’s working.

On hexbear we operate on a fork of Lemmy. One of the changes is to the active algorithm, which makes posts decay faster then core Lemmy. Since the change things move pretty smoothly on the front page.

An automated system of banning is something primed for abuse. We see this already on other platforms that has trigger mechanisms for banning a user pending review. Its a shoot first ask questions later approach that could be weaponized against people.

Echo chamber is a very loaded term. A safe community is a protected community. To someone intruding on a space that values the community it has built, it might look like bad faith action. However, often the inverse is true, and the intruder is the one acting in bad faith. That could mean they willingly or ignorantly disregard the rules of a space, or are unwilling to listen and understand the perspective of a given space, and simply want to argue.

The value in Lemmy is that you can build and curate the kind of site culture and ultimately network culture you desire. If you do not like that culture, you can anyways find another place to hang out.

As it stands, you can implement your ideas using a bot. One thing definitely lacking on Lemmy is a kind of Auto moderator. It should be remembered though that auto moderator was a community built tool until Reddit assimilated it into the site as a core feature.

Just try blocking UniversalMonk, we all know they have dozens of accounts with hundreds of downvotes across every comment and post and yet they keep going. Or any of the conservative communities who’s total post score is in the red.

So you want this to be an echo chamber? Oh and by someone else’s count, I have over 45,000 downvotes. I even put it in my profile.

All I do is post news articles that you don’t like. I don’t advocate violence. I don’t advocate any illegal activities. I don’t even advocate anything radical.

I post shit from Daily Mail and you want me permabanned. LMAO

Ignore and move on.

I’m not going anywhere, friend. I won’t go away.

The fediverse is about diversity of thought AND opinion. And it’s awesome.

Oh and if you really want a “don’t feed the trolls” situation, maybe try not to start a fucking thread about me and give me a name shoutout in it! Thanks, amiko!

Report, so that mods can take action.

I really enjoy the post downvotes, as if to directly demonstrate why this is a terrible idea. It was a fair question and there is nothing wrong with asking it, but people are mashing downvote anyway because they disagree.

The button has too much power already and too few people are interested in using it correctly.