How does it work if a user on another instance (that has downvotes enabled) downvotes comments on BeeHaw.org communities? Are they ignored? Can other instances see them?

Absolutely. Your only choices for not getting downvotes was to say something everyone will agree with, or cloak yourself in 1000 layers of sarcasm and jokes so no one can shut you down anyways.

And as I mentioned I am extremely sincere and don't care for defensive irony. Not for me.

Always just stuck to the smaller, interest/specific topic focused subreddits as a result.

That's my experience too. Downvotes are not supposed to be for disagreeing but they are used like that since people can't handle someone disagreeing. :)

An old forum I used to frequent had a downvote system that required you to specify a reason for why you felt that post or comment required a downvote. That reason (and the account that submitted it) was visible to the person whose post got downvoted and to the moderators, but to no one else.

It still worked well for filtering out troll posts and spam, and legit posts were almost never downvoted as you couldn't do so fully anonymously and moderators could take action when you abused the system.

I could see this becoming highly impractical when communities become as huge as on Reddit though, but for a smaller forum that one had a few hundred active users it worked really well.

Your text is almost exactly my thought process too. But unlike Reddit if you don’t like how a community is moderate you can go start the same community on a different instance and lead its moderation efforts the way you think is appropriate. Then the communities will follow natural survival prices where whichever community is liked more will attract most people from the other community

It would help if you had more signals. This is different from, this is off topic, vs this is evil.

I think that will turn out to be really important in the long run. The gamification aspect of karma score let to posts and comments leaning more to the quick and funny, and less to long and thoughtful. Especially in bigger subreddits. And then bots started to just repost and reuse previous highly upvoted stuff to boost their numbers even further.

Yeah it's the lack of vote counting, more than the lack of downvotes, that I really appreciate. (Not to say I really miss downvotes or anything, I just really don't care either way.)

I'm also on Tildes and they also lack downvotes, but once you've been on there a week you get the ability to label things (noise, jokes, malice), which sort of functions as a more nuanced downvote button. But they share the lack of overall karma score, which keeps that same nice non-performative vibe.

The admins have taken a stance where this should be a safe space and those being insulted/harassed/discriminated against are welcome to respond in kind. The most important part is to report it so the mods/admins can review and take action as needed.

While it may not be nice to tell nazi punks to fuck off, it will ultimately make for a nicer community if they do - we don't mind community members saying "hey, this isn't cool" in whatever manner they feel necessary.

without downvotes as a tool against crap like that, what have we got? is it against our instance’s “be nice” policy to tell nazi punks to fuck off?

nope! we're not going to ban for telling a TERF or nazi to eat shit or whatever. we as admins do try to be nice where possible, but you as a user really aren't obligated to be because that's dumb lol. you can also report it to us and in general we dispatch users who are like that as possible (although sidenote: if it's a post off-instance and you report it, unless the user is really, really bad we probably won't do anything immediately because we just can't keep an eye on every possible bad actor.)

If downvotes had been used as originally intended, they would be perfectly fine. But the cultural shift over time on the site from "downvote things not adding to the conversation" to "downvote what I don't agree with" made their existence more toxic to conversations. Weighing down unpopular opinions in the sort feed made it even easier for echo chambers to build up. Having a way to give comments that are productive a bump is enough for effectively sorting things.

Maybe an unpopular opinion of mine, but I don’t mind downvotes, but there doesn’t need to be a calculation of the sum of the upvotes and downvotes imv. That way both are observable for the users. If something is unpopular, you can see it but it doesn’t affect its overall standing in post hierarchy, pretty sure this is how reddit used to be about a decade ago.

Having only upvotes is still a bit of an echo chamber, but it's moreso affected by how many people have seen the post (and in a related fashion, how early a comment was made in a thread), not whether people agree with the post. As someone mentioned, youtube's dislike scenario is a good example of this in the real world. Downranking harmful/unhelpful videos is important for users on youtube, and it's still useful on a platform like this. Without downvotes, if I came across a comment with 12 upvotes, I would have to mentally weigh how many people I think saw that post, and how many thought it was bad information.

I'll note that I fully agree with almost all the points in favor of having no downvotes, but I think the utility of downvotes is just more important in my opinion.

Did we already forgot about YouTube that literally mask shitty videos because of the no downvote counter? Or Facebook that can spread fake news and shit because of it? Downvotes can be bad but imo only upvotes can be worse.

You nailed it in 2 sentences.

Man, do I miss a good forum.

I still have an account on a really great college football board that has taught me a TON about the most random things. All while being generally awesome people. Hoping at least some of this new (to many of us n00bs) world stays this way.

Nice. I didn't know about that option.

Edit: The setting is also avaliable on the jerboa android app and it is tied to your profile so it carried over which is convenient.

Yeah, my concern is that the trolls will be just as visible as the recent comments, and that we'll get overloaded with "take my upvote", "this is the way", and "nice" comments which are essentially spam

Now we have infinite fake internet points.

The good thing is the karma system is no longer here to torment you. You also won't be shadowbanned for arbitrary reasons like on Reddit. I personally do prefer downvotes to use them against bad faith discourse or trolls (there was a user posting female scat pics on random communities in lemmy.world)

What's funny is that I see that people down voted you for that comment.

I never cared about karma on reddit so I just said what I wanted and didn't care. Here, so far, haven't dealt with anyone just being randomly aggressive for no reason so, at least I hope, my comments have been fairly neutral.

omg i can troll now no downvotes omg nice!

You can collapse comments on the web interface (don't know about the apps), but it doesn't appear to persist across page reloads. Might be a good feature request

Dopamine is a hell of a drug.

That sounds kinda awful to me, because it could be used to just disappear unpopular comments complaining of racism or transphobia or whatever, or even just to disappear a comment saying "I hated this really popular game actually because xyz". It sounds like something that would exaggerate the hivemind effect of downvotes rather than alleviating it, and probably be used to silence even justifiably angry or emphatic comments, if now you can't even see the few comments that disagreed with the majority in a thread.

It doesn’t seem to work correctly — yet(?). Beehaw users can’t downvote anywhere. Other users can downvote on beehaw.

the global downvoting disable is a byproduct of how toggling downvotes off works with federation: since you access other instances through browsing us, the current implementation can't distinguish where we end and another instance begins. this might eventually get fixed but it's at worst an inconvenience. downvotes meanwhile don't register from anywhere--if a downvote looks like it works, it doesn't actually. nothing happens.

Exactly! I once posted about a particular TV show, and how it really helped me view my personal trauma in a different way and empowered me. A really long and emotional and sincere post. After around an hour I got scared and deleted it because I had 0 comments and like 15 downvotes. I just felt embarrassed for not sharing a meme or something and instead being earnest about it.

haha not that you should care, but guess you can be downvoted via other instances.

To be fair, the report feature exists and considering that they do the submissions so well, they'd probably be able to check it pretty often.

yes, it's one of the reason I choose beehaw when I registered

For me, the OP is showing 20 down votes, so I guess they are stored somewhere?

No. I try all the time and get "Downvotes Disabled".