I far prefer it to be transparent. But its good that instances can make the decision for themselves.

I think downvotes are ok as long as they show the real ammounts along the upvotes, besides there’s no karma here.
Also for those that say people could abuse downvotes to bury discussion, well guess what? People abuse upvotes too to increase their visibility, then we should disable upvotes so they can’t be abused either, right?

I think it’s ok if an instance decides to disable them (or both) if they don’t want or can’t deal with being downvoted, but trying to spread it to other instances is just trying to create a circlejerk.

no, sometimes people suck and deserve to have their sentiment downvoted - at least on a site where voting has to exist

on proper forums where there is no voting, there are better ways to discourage behavior, like just ignoring the user / posts. but if the buttons are there you want to click them

imo we should 100% keep downvotes, how else would we shame bigoted opinions?

I personally feel like restricting downvotes is cutting off a vital voice that people may have so that’s why in my instance I have them enabled. If there’s something that the community disagrees with I feel like the community should be able to vote on that rather than only allowing upvotes and not allowing everyone to voice their proper opinion on something.

I like that profile view in lemmy does not show the total “score”. So when someone downvotes your comment, they downvote just that, the comment, not you. Which I think is good for mental health.

Speaking for myself, I feel that possibility of getting downvotes makes me more careful to not invoke negative emotions in others and instead keep more positive tone. In the long run that may be good for everyone’s mental health as well!

If there’s an election but you only able to vote on one party, is it a democracy?
That’s how digg.com ended, removed mods and downvotes, and users left.

I can post something that I think it’s funny or interesting, but other don’t, it’s their opinion to vote what it’s of their interest

I don’t know about the mental health aspect, but I know that up/down-voting can be abused. Getting rid of down-voting doesn’t really fix anything. For me, on lemmy.one, which also has down-voting disabled, it just kind of makes me feel like I’m supposed to up-vote everything I don’t dislike. So it seems like disabling down-voting just breaks an otherwise useful metric. I think an actual solution might involve weighing up and down votes according to a karma-like score of whoever is voting. This way, it will be very inefficient if a bunch of fake or bad accounts try to harass someone with lots of down-voting or try to promote a bad post with lots of up-voting.

Disabling downvotes in brigade-prone or support communities makes sense, but I wish more instances had downvotes enabled. Sometimes I see posts giving incorrect information or just incredibly bad takes that don’t necessarily reach the level where mod intervention is required.

I like it today. Depends on how judicious mods are with bans. If there’s a genuine threat of being banned for not be(e)ing nice, it may not matter. That said, I think that if these communities ever reach the size of something like Reddit, downvotes may actually have a place.

I feel that downvotes / dislikes don’t contribute in large forum-style communities. The “proper” use of them is very useful, but the “improper” usage of downvotes becomes rampant on larger communities, rather than people expressing “this doesn’t contribute” with downvotes they end up using them to express “I don’t like you and/or your opinion” which results in high-quality posts and comments getting downvoted into oblivion because they do not conform to what the majority deems correct.

This also can be exasperated in communities that are more taste-based, e.g. a community discussing music rather than a community dealing with more objective knowledge.

I guess this is a really long way of saying that I agree with them disabling them but I do not think “mental health” is the concern, more so that they cannot fulfill their intended purpose in larger communities or taste-based communities.

I saw my first anti-trans meme on lemmy.ml today. It was a screenshot from a Babylon Bee article.

On Reddit, I didn’t like how much things would get downvoted if the sub didn’t want to hear them. It really strengthened the hive mind. At the same time, it was an organic way of rejecting garbage like anti trans memes.

I feel mixed about whether or not they add to a community. I’m not worried about bullying, but I am worried about how they shut down ideas, and encourage everyone to think the same way.

I really love that each instance gets a choice in the matter, and that we as a result also have a choice. There’s definitely situations where downvotes are abused, and other situations where they are insightful - as discussed by the other commenters here already.

As a result, we can customize our Lemmy experience to fit both scenarios just by having two accounts. If you’re looking for advice on car modifications, use a Lemmy account with downvotes visible. If you’re looking for a safe space to express emotions without the risk of feeling invalidated, use your account where they’re disabled.

We don’t have to choose one and commit to it. Instead, we can use the right tool for the right job, and have a better experience overall.

One-size-fits-all is for centralized forums, not Lemmings. 😄

A practice like allowing or disallowing downvotes cannot on its own be judged “healthy” or “unhealthy”.

Absolutely not. It is misleading like on YouTube. Before they removed downvotes everyone could see if a video is useful or not. “Best tips and tricks for car repair” … 15341 upvotes? Nice! Maybe it’s helpfu–… 98412 downvotes? Maybe not THAT helpful.