My wonderful co-admin @supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone has made a modification to the downvote system. It's not currently enabled, but if we were to turn it on, downvotes would be available for use, but they would weigh 5 times less than an upvote.
Which is to say, it would take 5 downvotes to counter an upvote. This would let downvotes have an impact on what appears in the hot topics sort, but hopefully mitigate some of the more negative impacts of downvoting.
Are there any strong objections from Blahaj Lemmy users to enabling downvotes with this modification?
I personally think downvotes are unnecessary, because if there's any constructive disagreements to be discussed, it's better to get people talking rather than downvoting. Not upvoting is basically the new downvote, which would make sense if someone is flaming or trying to sow discord, they are basically ignored. Negative attention is still attention, and those types don't deserve any.
Edit: To clarify, I think downvotes aren't a good idea for blahaj but, as others ITT said, will put us at a disadvantage if other instances have downvotes enabled.
Plenty of accounts on reddit just existed to see how much they could get downvoted by picking fights and spreading hate for fun, I don’t want to see any of that here
Exactly, downvotes are another way of feeding the trolls