No, reddit is not removing downvotes. The post was alluding to when they removed displaying downvotes scores.

Well that's depressing, I went over to seattle on old and it had a lot of content. It doesn't show any votes if you're not signed in.

Their ranking algorithm very clearly leans on a relative engagement metric pretty heavily, and has for a while.

The voting will stay but your homepage will be a for you page that selects posts based on your usage data and whatever is trending instead of the votes, in an attempt to bring engagement to a maximum. Just like what's been happening to Instagram for years.

Yes now that engagement is directly monetized, you’re likely correct

I just went on Reddit. I could down vote.

What gives?

Reddit removed downvotes?

It's because bigots will blanket down vote any and everything in queer instances.

Try holding a conversation when posts are all sitting in the negatives and nobody sees them unless they go directly to the community and sort by new.

Beehaw does the same. I'm not sure if that's been the case in our instance. I don't inherently disagree, but I'm not 100% sold either.

If there's a clearly bad/misinformed/rude take, they simply don't get voted on. They rarely have more than the single 1 vote of their terrible opinion/sharing.

It's common to see +10 to +30 on a positive comment, with the comment it's responding to at 1.

I don't disagree that it could be a bad thing, but I think it's about the community and its practice surrounding it as well. So far in my experience on the instance I participate in I've seen it be effective.

Also I'm not sure if this is a thing on Lemmy but on reddit there were downvote farmers. Downvoting could also actually encourage people to perform these terrible comments to accumulate as many downvotes as they can. Downvoting disabled removed this problem in its entirety. Reddit has this issue long before some of its other problems and it has only grown since, up til I left. I don't know what the state of it is now, and I'm not sure how big of an issue it even is on Lemmy. It comes down to finding the line between what is preferable.

All in all, I think there are good and bad things about not having a downvote. I do think downvote disabled helps some aspects (engagement, active/trending posts) but it could also negatively influence federated content (spam, bad actors). I don't think a comment being at -30 is any more telling than the same comment at 1 when it's surrounded by +30 upvoted comments. However, if someone actively sought out getting downvoted, that can no longer exist.

IMO trading having bad comments be visibly negative in order to prevent the downvote farmers is a reasonable exchange

That genuinely sucks and helps misinformation spread.

I don't see how. What I think is that it makes a less toxic environment.

I don't care about Karma, I care about comments being sorted by general usefulness.

Your take on Hexbear is absolutely correct

It's also something I've pointed out in the past that netted me bans on other instances (not just the community but the whole instance)

My instance has down votes disabled as well and it's something that has made me want to switch instances at times. Not to mention the admin really wanting to federate with Hexbear which is absolutely not popular with the users on the instance.

for fascist propaganda

Do you have a source on this? Everything I've seen them post has been left wing. Most of which was anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.

Have they ever (in the last 5 years)? I thought it's always a total amount type of counter instead of the way lemmy does it.

Tbf I was using a 3rd party client or the new ui so pardon if it's only the old ui.

Yeah the amount of posts I see just sitting at zero when all the comments are negative about the post is staggering

I've even down voted some just to see them pop right back to zero