Yes I like having downvotes. I use downvotes to notice trends of spam so I can better identify who to report/block.

That site sabotages the back button, fyi.

ALSO the downvote disabling feature never worked as intended. It only blocks lemmynsfw accounts from downvoting anything, lemmynsfw or otherwise. THIS account could already downvote anything federated.

I was for disabling down votes the last goaround wrt this topic, and I’m of the same opinion.

LemmyNSFW hasn’t grown much more in the past year and this will just drive away more posters (of which there aren’t much left) imho

Additional - I’d prefer that others block me (so they don’t have to see what I post) or block/don’t subscribe to various communities I mod that they don’t want to see as part of their feed, rather than have them downvote individual top level posts.

Enabling downvotes wrt comments, I’m okay with…

I’m for them in theory but I feel like they get abused. Like if someone posts a dick in gonewild. Nothing wrong with that, but most people don’t wanna see dicks.

I don’t suppose you can leave it up to the sub-lemmy to decide? (Sub lemmy? Wtf are we calling these?)

I feel downvotes are fairly useless.

They’re used as a disagree button. Ok but why do you disagree? Leave a reply and let’s discuss. Gain saying has little value and that’s all a downvote to disagree is.

They’re used to report spam. Spam should be reported so I don’t think that’s a valid argument for them. Downvoting spam leaves it up, reporting spam gets it taken down. We have a better solution to spam than downvotes.

They are used by bad actors, with the removal of downvotes bad actors have to spend more effort in making a comment and it becomes far more obvious in who they are, report and block them.

Finally downvotes are a way to yuck someone’s yum, I’m mindful of the instance we’re on. I don’t want our communities to become like Reddit where only one genital configuration and body type are allowed.

I’m 50/50 on this, so I’ll not vote, but I want to at least share my thoughts.

On one hand I generally like downvotes, because it makes it easier to identify bad actors & trolls. However, on an instance that’s all about nudity and sex, it could become a tool for harassment towards original content creators, which could discourage them from actually participating here. And I think OC is something we’d generally like to see more of, right? Or if we go with people who may be not quite the model standard body type, or do content that may not be the most vanilla kink out there, then they may be discouraged simply by people being not a fan of it, and it being very visible to them. It’s one thing to not get many upvotes, another to receive a lot of downvotes.

If this was a regular instance I’d easily vote for the downvotes, but here I’m rather leaning towards “nay”.

I think it’s better to have a button to report spam, harassment, etc , rather than using downvote. Downvote is too ambiguous.

Enabled downvotes and place immediately got more argumentative and a bit more toxic. No, not want.

I too, as a person who has no feelings for men, have clicked posts for gay porn by accident. I too have come across posts which I did not prefer, even if they were concerning women. I, too, have seen some things which in general I do not like. In these cases—

I simply became more careful and started taking a look at the community name first. Secondly I started looking for communities whivh fit what I like better. Niche ones without exposure. A good sign. For the last, there are a number of ways for me to deal with it, like simply moving on. Blocking where maliciousness exists. Finding other communities. Et cetera.

Liked having them gone. Not sure I’ll keep posting if they stick around.

I think vote up is to “like” a post and down vote to “dislike” a post. If the intent is to use down votes to prevent spam that is what a report button would be for.

When is a decision expected?

No downvotes. People use it as a “this isn’t my fetish” button and everything even slightly niche gets sent to oblivion. Especially bad for gonewild posts where people’s self image gets involved.

Also using a Google doc for this poll seems like a bad idea since people who aren’t from this instance can vote

Thank you for involving the community in the decision :D I generally like downvotes because it allows scrolling top posts to see the most generally liked content. It’s still easy to view New posts to see things without being affected by downvotes, like looking at a niche topic.

I don’t see it being a benefit in communities in that I mod (hentai, paizuri, tentaclehentai, and hentaigif), so I’m not personally keen on it but I can see why larger communities might want it. I’m no longer as hopeful that a more active hentai-oriented community will develop here, so though I voted “No”, I’m a little apathetic about the choice now, personally.

From what I recall, some users use downvotes for more than just spam, like disliking things. This creates a problem when people browse the Local feed and downvote stuff they don’t like even if they aren’t even subbed to that community. This impacts niche communities and their posters/creators who would get more downvotes from people seeking more mainstream content even if it would otherwise fit that community.

If the goal is just to ward off spam, then unless reports aren’t enough, I’d keep downvotes off.

Definitely enable; e.g.: lets say based on my sorting algorithm and frequency of frontpage visits, I usually see posts with ~20 upvotes (sounds like a weird oversimplification but that is kind of the case for me foe some reason)

For those 20 upvotes there might be 500 more people that believe that a post is very low quality, inappropriate for the community’s topic, etc., but I still see it, since, well its score was ~20.

Without upvotes it was very frequent that I saw a post that was not (or was very-very slightly) related to the community’s theme, and there is absolutely no other way for the community to filter it out. It forces me (everyone) to scroll across much irrelevant content, until maybe I give up and unsubscribe from some communities altogether, instead of helping to curate them into something people enjoy visiting.

The only other solution to this problem is to have moderators check every post that is uploaded, and, besides putting more strain to moderators, one moderator’s decision might even be debatable sometimes (e.g. a post might technically fit in a community, but the people who visit it might not find it enjoyable, or will just prefer to see it in a more appropriate community).

Downvotes provide a simple solution that involves many opinions in this whole process.

The only case that not having downvotes might make sense, is “Top”, in which I feel I only see posts with an insane number of upvotes (that I btw might not enjoy seeing) and nothing else. I also feel that this sorting algorithm also promotes the visibility of more generic content that a larger variety of people will enjoy, and will just upvote without considering the community it was posted in etc. But in those cases, the posts with many upvotes, can only get more upvotes (promoting the phenomenon), whereas with the ability to downvote, the final score will be more balanced, or at least leave the choice to the user (maybe indirectly via the choice sorting algorithm, or their client’s settings), for if they want to see controversial posts.

I created this account solely for, uhm, research purposes but I’m using it as my only account now. Partly because my other instance had some persisting issues for a few weeks and partly because I realized the missing downvoting really helped me chill and stop looking at/for karma. Not that I’m here to collect points, but my primitive monkey brain found a source of cheap reward and enjoyed it. I’m not really into downvotes, but I’m fine with both if others care for it.