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I unchecked the 'Show Scores' option in settings (desktop site) and I enjoy the experience a lot

feels like old school forums where people just communicated instead of all this useless gamification

extremely sincere

Yea I totally relate to that. People don't like heartfelt actual thought with emotion ime. A quirky one liner though? Upvote.

I tend to let it all out on these places, like a journal. I enjoy reading others entries too.

I'm in complete agreement. When I joined Beehaw, I didn't think much of the lack of downvotes - "oh, cool, sounds good." It's definitely made it easier to want to interact with the community (as someone partial to lurking) and I've come to appreciate that they're disabled on this instance. Glad to see others are in agreement.

I think it also fundamentally changes the conversation. Valid but "unpopular" comments can't get buried in downvotes. The voting system on Reddit was based on a sane logic that totally neglected to consider how people actually behave.. the idea of up and down votes to crowd-source relevance and quality of content makes sense, but all anyone did was use it as an agree / disagree button which broke the idea entirely.

Huh, I was wondering why some stuff didn't show votes. I guess this explains it.

Ironically this is how it was done on Digg before reddit, you could only "digg" something to increase its score.

I really dont like downvotes either. It's better to upvote content you like.

But can we downvote from other federated instances?

I feel the same. Although I started at beehaw and really liked the idea. I carried over to my own instance and it's nice. I have a few times looked for the down vote and realized I wanted it because I disagreed with whatever the comment was. That's silly... I use the upvote for thanking someone essentially at this point.

I agree wholeheartedly. I didn’t like downvotes, but I didn’t realize how terrible the concept of downvotes really was until I lived without it.

Here’s my comment from another thread:

I wasn’t a fan of Reddit’s downvote system. It was a pointless, vague way to show displeasure without actually providing any useful information. I never knew if a downvote was because I made a comment that was factually wrong, the reader had a differing opinion, or simply because I made a grammatical error. Plus, there’s brigading. By itself, a downvote doesn’t really tell you anything.

I’m sure that in at least some cases, a genuine discussion (rather than a simple downvote) would have been more thought-provoking for everyone.

I guess I'm the only one that misses downvotes. I don't take offense to being downvoted - the points/karma is completely irrelevant and I feel like it helps keep unhelpful or irrelevant comments and content at the bottom and out of my feed.

You've got a point. I was bothered with no downvotes until your post and it's true, we are free to actually have open conversations here instead of be received with being downvoted. Cool!

It's kind of unrelated but I think the lack of downvotes pairs well with lemmy's lack of vote counting (a.k.a karma score). Counting your internet points always feels so performative to me and kinda ruins the point of upvotes in the first place.