Ask Lemmygrad

I think the up arrow should be shaped like a hammer & sickle and the down arrow like the US flag.

No. Otherwise we wouldn't get bangers like this.

Votes increase engagement.

Imagine you make a really good post, but there's nothing to really add to it. If there weren't votes, it would look like that post wasn't even seen by anyone because no one responded. This would discourage posters and effectively kill the forum.

I can see an argument for removing downvotes, but removing votes entirely would be a huge mistake.

Lemmy was created as a Reddit alternative by Marxist-Leninists, and borrowing from Reddit’s voting system was an explicit design goal.

As for downvoting specifically, I’ll point to muad_dibber’s & darkcalling’s comments: Getting rid of downvotes the way Hexbear did

@darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml calls this below, disagreement without elaboration. That’s a really apt way to put the solution to the burnout you described above, that we often feel when we’re forced to engage with reactionary content when we don’t have the energy to at that moment.

darkcalling’s original comment:

I need downvotes to push down incorrect, idealist, frankly liberal opinions of which a not insignificant amount come from the aforementioned instance.

We either get rid of downvotes and adopt a more brutal moderation policy that sees any liberalism or idealism result in a removal and quick trip to a permanent ban which means more work for mods or we like communists accept liberals occasionally coming in with their little downvotes while utilizing them ourselves as a discipline measure to as a community hold to account liberal, idealist, reactionary, and otherwise wrong opinions that otherwise threaten to poison the minds of learning comrades.

I see this kind of poison frequently on hex bear and frankly it does not encourage anything but low effort, lower the bar emote spamming which does little to measure actual community opinion (a dozen idealists may upvote a bad comment while only 3 people bother to put down bear emojis which are clunky anyways and amount to discourse clogging “same” comments which add nothing.) Downvotes are the elegant solution and so far especially with our recent defederation from world the liberals are not near outnumbering us.

Democratic participation and discipline includes disagreement without elaboration especially when dealing with many opinions which are frankly unstudied and by people who otherwise should have no right to speak.

It's a semi-anonymous way to show support or disapproval of a claim. Seeing a widely upvoted and not downvoted comment can reveal what the community believes. Seeing one with mixed or overwhelmingly negative vote totals can help signal that these views are highly unpopular.

I always hated the voting system on reddit, but I think that's because on reddit, it was basically a gauge of whether you said something popular relative to the specific subreddit you stumbled upon and people would use it as a disagreement button all the time, making already niche subreddits all the more insular.

On lemmygrad, I find that with the exception of the occasional out of the ordinary controversial subject, it mostly seems to get used as an ideological/corrective barometer. A way of pointing out "hey, this doesn't seem right, what are you saying" if something is really off.

Versus on reddit, people will just kinda use it to bludgeon others even if what they said is accurate and fair.

crowds applause and boo, i don't think there's anything wrong with that. i really don't think there's an effective or meaningful way to incorporate constructive criticism outside the context of an actual org tbh. so long as really low effort and bad faith stuff is moderated, i'm not sure what else you can do except be the change you wish to see in others.

voting and the related sorting is the entire point of using reddit-likes such as lemmy, otherwise it would just be a less mature (software wise) vbulletin/phpbb style forum

While on Reddit, I vaguely remember there being discourse on how upvotes should be for adding to the discourse only. Also that there was some archaic form of AI baked into the algorithm so that users who upvoted en masse would not have their votes counted.

While I wouldn't want AI in any form for moderation, I think this discussion is necessary and perhaps we ought to have more information on how it is meant to encourage discussion through upvotes, whether or not we use downvotes.

I'll just say I haven't missed downvotes at all since using Hexbear for as long as I have. I kind of wish it was like that everywhere.

I basically think imageboards are the perfect form of "social media."

No complicated engagement systems, posts are simply ordered by whatever had the last reply. It's very objective in that way.

I suggest the hexbear compromise. Downvotes are the only thing removed.