downvoting everything i disagree with seems excessive and unhealthy, considering i can just ignore and move on. Beehaw doesn't have downvotes at all, reasoning that you can ignore it and move on or report it, and it seems to work fine for them. i do think downvotes have a use though, i'm just not sure what it is. what do you all think?
I generally use it for "you're a twat" in general-discussion posts, or "that's actually misleading people" in factual-resource posts. Stuff that doesn't warrant reporting, but I feel should be discouraged nonetheless, by my own personal standards.
Shit takes, unpleasant ideology, aggrieved stupidity, a senseless waste of perfectly good electrons, etc.
Disagreeing is fine; I can disagree with people all day and not downvote them over it. Being wrong about stuff doesn't make someone an asshole. However, being an asshole about stuff does frequently make people wrong, which is where the confusion may lie.
Depends on the disagreement. "I don't like shoes that have separate toes". Yeah, okay, that's your choice, I love my VFFs anyways. "I think Jews should be murdered", no, sorry, you don't get to have an opinion about the rights of other people to exist and occupy space.
I personally think people "should" use the downvote feature on comments that are objectively false, are unrelated to the topic of discussion or on troll/harmful comments
Things that are particularly low effort or that don't really fit in the sub. Blatant marketing outside of AMAs. Rudeness that doesn't break the rules. Double/triple/howevermanyposts. Blatant misinformation that could hurt someone. Anyone that tries to say something nice about spez.
I think that sums up the major categories, off the top of my head.
It is public data, however, I don't believe there is a frontend for retrieving it yet. You could probably pull it by hand from an api endpoint if you really want to know.
I downvote people who post a million comments or replies instead of just using the edit feature. It makes discussion and following a thread super hard for no reason, especially if one reply gets a long chain of direct replies going, and context in the form of a sibling comment to the highest comment of the chain gets lost.