As you might have noticed, there is currently no option to down-vote posts here.
When Lemmy was much smaller there were some bad faith actors organizing down-votes on posts they didn't like and because a few down-votes already meant a lot this was quite effective (from their perspective) to shape the discourse to their liking.
These days our instance is bigger and we have also blocked the worst offenders (and will continue to do so), so I am wondering if we should re-enable down-votes?
Personally I think they are useful in some cases, but ideally the down-votes would not federate to other instances. This option however is not available in Lemmy, so it is either on or off.
I will make three comments below this, one you can up-vote if you are in favour of enabling down-votes again, one if you are against it and one if you abstain from making a decision on this.
Note to non-slrpnk.net members: please don't up-vote any of the below comments I make.
I'll leave this vote open for some days... and anyway: no decision is final and if it becomes a problem again it is easy to disable it.
Edit: If you have for some reason a strong objection and want to veto this, please comment below.
Edit: I enabled down-votes with the upgrade to Lemmy version 0.18. At the time of writing this it is 45 votes for enabling down-votes, 32 against enabling them, and 10 abstentions. Lets see how it goes.
I'm brand new to Slrpnk, so I'm not sure if my opinion bears much weight here, but I was a bit bummed to get all set up with my subscriptions to find that downvotes are disabled (it's possible I missed this info in the sign-up process, but I don't remember seeing it mentioned).
I think the fact that the rule extends to even browsing other instances while logged in here makes it difficult to gauge a key part of the prevailing opinion on posts and comments. We are only getting half the story at a quick glance. It's similar to when YouTube disabled downvotes, suddenly making it much more difficult to gauge the quality of a post at a glance (especially on videos that contained tutorials that could be rife with false information).
I get that I could just leave and join another instance where they aren't disabled, but I really like the ethos and local communities here, and I don't feel like a downvote necessarily goes against that ethos. If anything, I think it is a slight overreach on personal freedom of expression and a bit stifling to the overall vibe to feel like a downvote is the end of the world.
I'm curious how long your poll will be open before making the decision and by what margin the winning decision must prevail.
Lemmy pre-Reddit exodus was pretty much like this: a groups of well organized HOA supporters starting arguments about why /c/nolawns is really bad and immediately down-vote all the posts on /c/nolawns and any other posts elsewhere that might be interpreted as against well manicured lawns. When calling them out on this, they would get really defensive and ask all their HOA friends to come over and down-vote and argue even harder. When blocking their main HOA instance, they would user their alt-accounts on other instances to continue down-voting anything they don't like.
If down-voting was just a number next to the post, you might as well just ignore it, but it also effects the sorting algorithm, thus meaning that if you have a chronically on-line group of people that almost immediately down-vote posts they don't like, they will disappear pretty quickly from the default "hot" sorting most people use and thus never be seen.