Has downvoting been added to the instance or was I blind?
I seem to recall that we did not had the option of downvoting posts, but I've noticed now the red arrow appears for me? Is it a bug, an error, was I blind before, or did the feature get added?
Image for testing purposes, I did not leave the downvote on the donations thread
You're not blind. Downvotes were re-enabled again yesterday. There's been no communication from admin regarding it though.
Odd choice, I'm pretty sure that the instances that don't allow it have done it explicitly because that's a fairly harmful way of engaging with a community - and also generally ruins post formatting
It was a deliberate choice that was made about a year ago due to a lot of brigading and people being generally shitty to the already limited number of posters. I don't think anything has changed regarding this though. I'm not sure what you mean by changing post formatting though as it really shouldn't affect that.
It's not gonna stop until Lemmy has enough content that people stop coming across niche NSFW content they aren't into in their "All" feeds because they're gonna automatically downvote it instead of blocking. Any uncommon kinks or male NSFW content is gonna be hurt by this. Disabling downvotes should be considered as a permanent setting for this instance.
It's sure to encourage people to share of themselves when they recieve two parts downvotes to every three parts upvotes. The lemmyverse is a hateful place.
I was disappointed to see it as well and I don't expect positive outcomes to come from it. We'll see what happens though I guess.
I enabled it to see if the brigading of down votes had stopped, and because off topic posts have been made to communities but were making it higher up in communities because down votes were not enabled, but that is only really a side reason.
I think downvotes have their place in forums like reddit and lemmy, when not abused. If I see reports of abuse again, they'll be disabled.
I agree with the secondary reasoning of irrelevant community posts. I report quite a few posts for that(mostly from content creators just spamming any and every community). Running a test is fine, but I don't think much has changed about the primary reasoning though I'm afraid. It might help with the spam at least because that's been bad recently.
Yeah I believe its new. I just noticed it yesterday.