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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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Why can't I downvote posts? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by outer_spec@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/main@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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Sometimes I see a post that could really use a downvote, but I can't downvote it. I really think being able to downvote posts that are not great (rascism, tankieism, dumbass takes, etc) is a really cathartic experience and I miss having it from my old instance.

I understand wanting to remove downvotes to combat negativity, but I don't think it's a good idea. When YouTube removed dislikes, people missed having them.

Edit: A lot of people are replying to this saying that if someone posts hateful content, I should just block and report them. Which I don’t disagree with, but there’s always content that’s annoying enough to want to downvote, but not bad enough to go against the rules of the sub. I’d rather just downvote that sort of thing and go on my way than leave a comment saying “shit’s cringe, yo”.

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[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 11 months ago

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.

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.

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.