no, sometimes people suck and deserve to have their sentiment downvoted - at least on a site where voting has to exist

on proper forums where there is no voting, there are better ways to discourage behavior, like just ignoring the user / posts. but if the buttons are there you want to click them

Absolutely not. It is misleading like on YouTube. Before they removed downvotes everyone could see if a video is useful or not. “Best tips and tricks for car repair” … 15341 upvotes? Nice! Maybe it’s helpfu–… 98412 downvotes? Maybe not THAT helpful.

imo we should 100% keep downvotes, how else would we shame bigoted opinions?

I think downvotes are ok as long as they show the real ammounts along the upvotes, besides there’s no karma here.
Also for those that say people could abuse downvotes to bury discussion, well guess what? People abuse upvotes too to increase their visibility, then we should disable upvotes so they can’t be abused either, right?

I think it’s ok if an instance decides to disable them (or both) if they don’t want or can’t deal with being downvoted, but trying to spread it to other instances is just trying to create a circlejerk.

I like it today. Depends on how judicious mods are with bans. If there’s a genuine threat of being banned for not be(e)ing nice, it may not matter. But if these communities ever reach the size of something like Reddit, downvotes may actually have a place.

I’m not a fan personally, I’ve never really cared about old Reddit cliches like “the hivemind” or “downvotes = disagreement”. I just really liked being able to tell bad content to fuck off without getting into a flame war. Beehaw’s moderation against hate speech is why I’m still with it despite the no downvote settings

I feel that downvotes / dislikes don’t contribute in large forum-style communities. The “proper” use of them is very useful, but the “improper” usage of downvotes becomes rampant on larger communities, rather than people expressing “this doesn’t contribute” with downvotes they end up using them to express “I don’t like you and/or your opinion” which results in high-quality posts and comments getting downvoted into oblivion because they do not conform to what the majority deems correct.

This also can be exasperated in communities that are more taste-based, e.g. a community discussing music rather than a community dealing with more objective knowledge.

I guess this is a really long way of saying that I agree with them disabling them but I do not think “mental health” is the concern, more so that they cannot fulfill their intended purpose in larger communities or taste-based communities.

I saw my first anti-trans meme on lemmy.ml today. It was a screenshot from a Babylon Bee article.

On Reddit, I didn’t like how much things would get downvoted if the sub didn’t want to hear them. It really strengthened the hive mind. At the same time, it was an organic way of rejecting garbage like anti trans memes.

I feel mixed about whether or not they add to a community. I’m not worried about bullying, but I am worried about how they shut down ideas, and encourage everyone to think the same way.

I like that profile view in lemmy does not show the total “score”. So when someone downvotes your comment, they downvote just that, the comment, not you. Which I think is good for mental health.

Speaking for myself, I feel that possibility of getting downvotes makes me more careful to not invoke negative emotions in others and instead keep more positive tone. In the long run that may be good for everyone’s mental health as well!

I far prefer it to be transparent. But its good that instances can make the decision for themselves.

No. Downvotes can help drive engagement as more people try to understand what was said.

People being downvoted doesnt necessarily mean it is hateful, it could just be incorrect or morally objectionable… it’s important that discourse is there, too.

If there’s an election but you only able to vote on one party, is it a democracy?
That’s how digg.com ended, removed mods and downvotes, and users left.

I can post something that I think it’s funny or interesting, but other don’t, it’s their opinion to vote what it’s of their interest

It depends on what the community is about. If it’s a community/instance that features a lot of opinionated talk, downvotes should be off to avoid those with different opinions being downvoted and hidden. On a note advice based/general community I think they should be left on.

I don’t know about the mental health aspect, but I know that up/down-voting can be abused. Getting rid of down-voting doesn’t really fix anything. For me, on lemmy.one, which also has down-voting disabled, it just kind of makes me feel like I’m supposed to up-vote everything I don’t dislike. So it seems like disabling down-voting just breaks an otherwise useful metric. I think an actual solution might involve weighing up and down votes according to a karma-like score of whoever is voting. This way, it will be very inefficient if a bunch of fake or bad accounts try to harass someone with lots of down-voting or try to promote a bad post with lots of up-voting.

If someone’s mental health is impacted that greatly from viewing a number on the internet, and they consider that bullying, then that person has some work to do on themselves instead of the website having to do some work to change something for every single person on the website.

If that is someones preference, then their answer is really simple already - use another Lemmy instance that hides them.