Fediverse memes

How I know?

Fine, I'll do it, how ya know?

I downvote anyone complaining about downvote out of principle.

Mine wasn't.

Communities trying to have alternate meanings for upvotes/downvotes must keep in mind that people scrolling posts across communities won't generally notice the community and if they do they won't read the rules and will vote however they want. Trying to force them to follow some silly community specific process is tilting at windmills and bitching about it is embarrassing.

aren't they the instance admin themselves?

Sadly one can't disable downvotes per community

That's just the Uber disagree button now.

I actually think up- and downvotes are inherently asymmetrical in this respect.

Upvoting things you agree with is fine and a main use of the function. Why then is downvoting things you disagree with wrong? Because the purpose of voting is visibility, you upvote things you want people to see, like arguments you agree with, and downvote those you don't think people should see.

Now if you believe in having an open discussion you don't want to suppress posts just because you disagree with them. Disagreeing is fine, so downvoting is reserved for posts that detract from the conversation.

In addition to what others said, in comments the down vote is meant to be used on comments that don't further discussion in good faith.

I used to subscribe to that idea, but I've since changed my mind. If the far majority use upvotes to mean agreement, then me upvoting a controversial, but well structured, opinion will likely be viewed as agreement as well.

It's a nice idea to think the voting system is meant to promote discussion, instead of homogenise opinions in a community.

when a post doesn't fit the community purpose or is generally inappropriate

Ok but even if its for something else everyone else is still using it for that. And on another note, why shouldnt i use it to show disapproval?

Spot on. Upvotes/downvotes are for voting on the quality of comment only in theory. In practice, they are agree/disagree buttons.

That's what it should be, a "booo!" for lazy and willfully ignorant comments.

In practice most people downvote any take they disagree with, no matter if it was expressed well, written respectfully, and contributes to the conversation.

I think it's a nice sentiment, but you can't change emergent behavior just by saying "this is wrong"

That's actually surprising to me, because I'd think that down voting whack stuff would make things better overall. What was happening? It's not like people know who it was, or were down votes done out of spite?

I also couldn't help but notice some super conservative instances I've seen have down votes disabled.