this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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Blåhaj Lemmy is a Lemmy instance attached to blahaj.zone. This is a group for questions or discussions relevant to either instance.
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Unless of course you're a member of a marginalised minority, in which case, downvotes will often be weaponised against you, when people who simply don't like you because of who you are, downvote anything and everything you say.
It's that specific aspect that has lead to them being disabled on an instance focused on trans and gender diverse folk
Which they can still do from other instances, apparently.
This is a well-meaning mistake that keeps getting made.
Downvotes are ignored by this instance, wherever the come from. The algorithm that determines display order is calculated independently on each instance, based on the upvotes and the downvotes that particular instance is aware of. Blahaj Lemmy drops all downvotes from all sources, so the feed that our users see, whether the content is originally from our instance or not, is ranked without downvotes being taken in to account.
tl;ldr - People downvoting our content or posts remotely makes no difference to our local users
Would an instance be able to collect downvotes to blahaj posts from other instances? Or do they treat blahaj as the definitive source, and only collect them from their own users?
I prefer not having downvotes. But it worries me if the instances that have them enabled all see a blahaj post with 50 downvotes, that it’s still having the same marginalising effect. While that is then hidden from the blahaj user.
An instance is aware of downvotes from two sources.
Firstly, instances know about downvotes made by its own users. It doesn't matter what those users are downvoting or what instance it comes from, by definition, the users instance needs to know about the downvote so it can forward it on
Secondly, instances know about downvotes that federate to them. Votes federate in one of two ways. (For these example, A B and C are all separate instances)
i) Direct downvotes. If user A downvotes another user, user B, that downvote is federated to instance B.
ii) Indirect downvotes. This is when groups "boost" downvotes to instances that have users that subscribe to the group. So normally, if user A downvotes user B, instance C won't know about that downvote. However, if the downvoted post is made to a group that user C is a member of, then the downvote is boosted to instance C.
Instances with disabled downvotes don't boost downvotes for communities hosted on them, and don't accept downvotes for any content that federates to it.
If the community is hosted on blahaj, then this can happen, but it's not a huge issue, because the only people who will see any particular downvote are other users on the instance of the person that made the downvote. These downvotes don't federate anywhere.
However, if the community is not hosted on blahaj, then what you're describing can happen. Unfortunately, there isn't much that can be done about that. The best we can do is ensure that downvotes driven by bigotry don't hide content from our users.
... then why would it matter if they're allowed? Even if they're like the Close Door button on an elevator. Honestly it could be a per-user option, at least on comment pages.
You're asking the wrong person. That's a question for the lemmy devs, not for the admins of a specific instance.
But you've modified it enough to ignore downvotes globally.
That's out of the box functionality. That's how it works on any instance that disables downvotes