Egg on my face for not realizing this sooner, but because I've been primarily using lemmy through Sync I didn't realize until yesterday that my current home instance has downvoting disabled. Apparently with lemmy that's a universal setting -- no one can downvote content in any community on the instance, but also accounts on that instance can't downvote content anywhere else.
Sync still displays the downvote button regardless, and will still highlight it in blue if you click it. It wasn't until I learned about Reddthat's policy and started testing how Sync was handling it that I saw the downvote doesn't "stick" -- a refresh shows the downvote button no longer highlighted and no change in the score's content. It's silently failing while in the moment looking like it succeeded.
Thank you for the response Tiff! Unfortunately I think you're making a mistake in blanket-characterizing downvotes as "disagreement." The practical reality of voting on a platform like this is that votes are functionally just feedback. And without the possibility of giving negative feedback, you're making it so that any negative behaviors large or small (bad-faith argument tactics, spreading misinformation, negativity / debbie-downerism, inappropriateness, click-baiting, reaction-baiting, trolling, hyperbole, off-topicness, just plain rudeness) -- can only get rewarded with upvotes and attention unless mods are constantly policing them to an extreme.
It doesn't matter if negative behaviors get less upvotes and attention than good behaviors, because a) it's usually lower effort and b) any net-positive outcome still reinforces it. Having to report to try to combat it raises the threshold of toxicity needed before most people are willing to "tattle" or "complain", and puts all of the burden on moderators to review every individual report and determine in each instance if the level of badness is enough to warrant removal or banning.
Negative feedback is important to healthy communication too. Downvotes help maintain civility and standards through consensus instead of fiat. Having to remove content that isn't malicious but is inappropriate for the context or goals of a community feels like much more of a "punishment" than downvotes do. That sucks for mods having to do that level of policing if they want a high-quality community, for users who are outspoken / prolific but sometimes need help knowing where the line is, and for community members who end up feeling disenfranchised that it's all up to the mods' judgement, level of effort, and favoritism.
🤷♂️ If you're committed to this route, I wish you luck in maintaining / scaling an environment in which downvotes aren't needed. Respectfully, I think it's a bit hubristic, and you might be letting a bias toward Reddit color your thinking too much here; downvoting is not their invention. Regardless, the core issue for me is that if I'm using Reddthat as my home instance, this decision restricts my options across all of lemmy. So I'll be making a switch, but I appreciate your intent and taking the time to consider. All the best.
I've mostly been using the Sync app (which shows a downvote option everywhere), so I didn't notice the lack of downvoting until I was spending a lot of time on desktop yesterday and saw there are actually no downvote buttons anywhere 😮 on Reddthat.
I've since tracked down what seems to be the Reddthat policy discussion around this issue, which also made clear that even if I downvote content from another instance through a 3rd-party app like Sync, because I'm doing it from an account on Reddthat (which has downvoting disabled), my downvote doesn't go through!
This sucks. 🙁 Downvoting is an essential tool for users to help keep their communities on-topic and discourage bad behavior. It lets people take action against ignorance or bigotry without feeding the trolls; minimize people trying to derail discussions or be obnoxious in the comments; and prevent memes, sensationalism, and low-effort posts from flooding communities meant for thoughtful discussion.
It's unfortunate that lemmy doesn't support disabling downvotes just within specific communities yet, so this wouldn't have to be such an all-or-nothing policy, but as-is this means making Reddthat my home instance has restricted my options and given me less of a voice everywhere within the lemmyverse.
@ticoombs@reddthat.com, is there any chance this policy will be reconsidered? So many comments in the previous discussion seemed to agree that downvotes are a valuable and desired feature. It doesn't seem like that feedback has resulted in any kind of policy change yet though. Was a specific decision made after that discussion to keep voting disabled, or has it just been stuck in a wait-and-see state? Would it be possible to change this?
The MBTA’s shortage of bus operators is more acute than ever, but relief could be coming soon: more competitive wages and benefits in the newly-adopted union contract have generated a significant surge in new job applications. In spite of intense recruiting efforts over the past year, the T currentl...
Boston City Council may soon provide a much easier path for street food vendors to sell from food carts in the city.
The crypt has been closed while it was undergoing a restoration project. But not disturbing the tombs and respecting the dead was a major part of the project.
>The Old North Church in Boston, known for the lantern signal that was a message arranged by Paul Revere, was built in 1723 and didn’t have space for a graveyard. Nine years after it opened, the organization said, “a single tomb was excavated under the sanctuary and additional tombs were added over time.” Burials took place in the crypt from 1732 to 1860.
Zoho Notes has feature parity for everything I've seen, including letting you add collaborators to a notebook or note / list.
Their last update to the home screen widget ruined the styling and usability of it. Made all the controls and notes take up a ton more space by turning them into big dumb child buttons, leaving way less room for actual content. I switched to Zoho notes.
City officials and health care professionals on Wednesday toured the now-dilapidated facilities. Inside, the buildings are in an eerie state of disrepair, nine years after being abandoned when the Long Island bridge shut down.
Lots of photos in this article make it clear there's a lot more work to be done to make this viable than just getting the bridge permits (which the Quincy mayor is still trying to cause problems for).
But all the representatives quoted from health & outreach groups involved -- Victory Programs, Volunteers of America, MGH-Brigham, the Gavin Foundation, Boston Medical Center, St. Francis House, Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program and Bay Cove Human Services -- indicate they think it will be worth it.
Dewey Parsons, the owner of Downtown Wine & Spirits in Somerville's Davis Square, has seen the neighborhood change dramatically in the 37 years he's been open, but next month he will be leaving for good.
It's been a staple of my Somerville experience for its massive craft beer selection, but there's a bunch of cool tidbits I didn't know about its owner and his impact on the Davis Square scene.
Please don't self-promote the same link across multiple communities at once. 🫤 Feels super spammy.
Don't get me wrong, most of the time I do enjoy Below Deck. But after multiple seasons, the editing and the formula are wearing on me. 😆
What else is out there that has:
- a sense of the work of travel
- more sights & culture
- some good group dynamics -- don't want a 'tour guide' show where everything's always filtered through the same person's lens. I like watching people go on a journey, together
Any recommendations?
Tabletop creators face an uncertain future post-Twitter, as the social media platform proved vital to promotion, busine…
Sorry, I don't agree. Telling people they need to "fix" something that is a universal standard everywhere else across the web is poor framing, and its explanation as to what issues it's actually trying to address is pithy and unclear.
I have no issue with there being a better way to internally link to communities within lemmy; it's essentially a lemmy-specific handles format for communities. But I don't think this bot does a good job of communicating that, especially to new users who have every reasonable expectation that a link is a good way to point to any place on the web.
Thank you; much appreciated!
Thank you for the explanation, it's much more helpful than the bot's message.
In this case specifically, the point of the URLs in my post is to show how the difference in how the subscriber stat for a community is displayed when it's viewed from instances other than your home instance.
If someone who already has a GitHub account wants to post this there, feel free. 🙂 It would be really weird if LJ were not also monitoring their own community the day after launch. 😕
Thank you; much appreciated!
Absolutely not. A URL is meant to be universal. If instances want to have some kind of custom shortcut format to linkify communities from just their name, that's cool, but I should not be getting nag messages for using an actual URL as they're meant to be used. There is nothing to "fix" in my post. Please fix your bot.
I signed up for an account through a smaller instance that felt like it suited me, and I'm trying to build out my feed and subscribe to communities across the federated network. But it's a pain that in the search summary and in the header of viewing an individual community, the number of subscribers shown isn't actually a count of how many people are subscribed to it. It's how many people are subscribed to it, from my local instance.
Obviously being on an instance with fewer users this means the number is small on just about everything, but even for users on larger instances looking to sub to communities on federated instances, this count is underreporting. The RPG community on ttrpg.network has 1.96k subscribers, but viewed through lemmy.world it would appear to only have 301. Viewed through my local instance, it shows as only having 13. 🙁
The subscriber count is the only stat provided in Sync's search listings view and in the header of an individual sub. It should be a useful metric for determining which communities across the network are getting good traction, but under this current setup, it's not.
Would it be possible to display the total number of subs each community has, on its native instance or across all instances (does anyone more familiar with Lemmy's technical architecture know if federated subscriptions are included in this count)? Or, would you consider replacing this stat with a more useful metric to gauge the sub's popularity, like the active users per week, which seems(?) to be a community stat that is federated across all instances?
Thanks for your work on Sync! Excited to make it one of my daily go-tos again.