By advantage I mean posts from those instances receiving more visibility than others on feeds that sort by score (active, hot, top).

There seems to be at least two ways in which posts from instances that don’t allow downvotes receive an advantage:

  • They don’t federate downvotes. That means other instances only count downvotes from their own users but not from the rest of the fediverse.
  • A downvote sometimes can be counted and federated as an upvote. This happens when you first upvote a post and then change it to a downvote.

Let’s see an example. Suppose we are a user from instance A that allows downvotes and we want to vote a post on instance B that doesn’t allow downvotes. Watch what happens on instance C that also allows downvotes.

  1. Before the vote this is what users from each instance see (upvote - downvote = total score)
    A: 10 - 0 = 10
    B: 10 - 0 = 10
    C: 10 - 0 = 10

  2. Now we upvote the post:
    A: 11 - 0 = 11
    B: 11 - 0 = 11
    C: 11 - 0 = 11

  3. We misclicked, we meant to downvote the post:
    A: 10 - 1 = 9
    B: 11 - 0 = 11
    C: 11 - 0 = 11

If the post was hosted on an instance that allowed downvotes users from instance C would see a total score of 9.

  • Cam@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1427·
    1 year ago

    It does. I will never use an instance without downvotes. Nobody liked it when youtube downvotes were hidden.

    • remotelove@lemmy.worldEnglish
      284·
      1 year ago

      I think there should be an option (unless there is) for mods to turn off (or hide) voting as needed. That might be an effective way to cancel any downvote brigades. Lemmy really doesn’t have the population for mass vote manipulation now, but it will soon enough.

      Hiding all votes can also help mitigate some superficial bias, but not all. I believe that if a person sees a comment with a few dozen downvotes first, they tend not to read the post objectively. After being on Reddit for such a long time (12 years or so), I found that it was super easy to manipulate voting trends if I caught a post or comment at just the right time.

      Hiding only downvotes is just silly though. Some register of public opinion, positive or negative, still has its uses, IMHO.

      • Cam@lemmy.worldEnglish
        101·
        1 year ago

        I dont see any issue with the user choosing weather upvotes or downvotes are visible or not. Not in favor of moderators or admins having a choice on this matter.

    • ttmrichter@lemmy.worldEnglish
      740·
      1 year ago

      I loved it when Youtube downvotes were hidden.

      Next on the chopping block: upvotes.

    • LedgeDrop@lemm.eeEnglish
      421·
      1 year ago

      I was on Beehaw and they block downvotes. I didn’t think much of it until I went to a federated channel with low participation (it was a new channel) and I wanted to downvote some bot-spam… but couldn’t cause Beehaw didn’t allow it.

      I understand (but don’t agree with) the site operators intention, but their rational breaks down if you view the fediverse as something more than the single instance you’re registered with.

      Fortunately, it’s easy to “vote with your feet”.

      • ruckblack@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        17·
        1 year ago

        Beehaw seems to want to only be beehaw lol. I’m honestly not sure why they’re even using lemmy to host their community.

        • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          If it becomes a big enough problem, other instances can de-federate with problematic instances. I don’t like de-federation, but I also don’t like disabling downvotes.

      • shotgun_crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Wait, so disallowing downvotes means you can’t downvote posts from any federated instance or did I get it wrong? That’s kinda weird…

        • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Users who can’t handle downvotes on their own instance clearly can’t be trusted with downvotes elsewhere.

      • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        33·
        1 year ago

        their rational breaks down if you view the fediverse as something more than the single instance you’re registered with.

        How so?

        • LedgeDrop@lemm.eeEnglish
          131·
          1 year ago

          Well Beehaw’s rational is explained in this thread.

          The reason I wanted to downvote was because Reddit communities like GameDeals is one of the new equalization I cannot easily find on Lemmy.

          Thus, I found !gamedeals@lemmit.online / https://lemmit.online/c/gamedeals. It uses a bot to scrape the content from Reddit, but the scoring and popularity is missing.

          When I joined there were only 13 people subscribed (now it’s 150+). If I’m limited to upvotes, it was difficult to “vote for the threads I liked” vs “vote for the shovelware” that appears in that channel.

          With downvote, I was able to downvote shovelware and upvote threads I thought others would be interested. Everything else would be left as neutral.

          • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            32·
            1 year ago

            I don’t really see how those two issues relate to each other though? You said beehaw’s rationalisation breaks down once you consider federation, but the problem you’re describing doesn’t really relate to federation. It also doesn’t really seem like much of a problem to me either to be honest. Yeah, it changes the dynamics of a group, but the good stuff will still get more upvotes than the crap. It’s not quite as granular as you would like, but it doesn’t fundamentally break the group or anything.

            • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Anyone on any other instance could reply with the word “downvote” and it would have the same effect. Users on the same instance could do that too, but typically people who join such instances agree with its sentiment.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
    162·
    1 year ago

    I have a very controversal piece of software for managing Lemmy that I posted about. It’s mainly for personal instances to sync defederated lists from larger entities. I.E. I want to own my account (or small group), and while I would use this larger site, I will use my own to spread the load, but trust the admins’ judgment.

    If it weren’t for down votes, from the post listing page users would think it was a huge hit, and not realize there is a healthy debate about how to use it, why, and when.

  • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.devEnglish
    111·
    1 year ago

    IIRC the removal of the upvote is also federated.
    When you change it to a downvote you first need to remove the upvote, that’s why it changed from 11 to 9.
    So, in instances B and C you’ll end up with 10 score.

    • ram@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Yes, but if you then downvoted the post it would still show a score of 10 in B and C instead of 9. This is the first of the two advantages I described. Even worse, if the post received 2 downvotes from ten different instances it would still show a score of 10 or 8 instead of -10.

  • Anafroj@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2013·
    1 year ago

    Keep in mind that not everyone is using the upvotes weighting, so it’s not just about “those who allow downvotes and those who don’t”.

    Personally, I find the whole upvoting/downvoting thing to be a very toxic feature that encourages hive mind and blaming divergence, so I hide scores and I sort posts and comments by chronological order. I would not use Lemmy if I was forced to be under the influence of social scoring, so defederating from instances which do not apply the same rules on downvoting would feel very detrimental to me.

    Upvotes/downvotes were implemented by websites like Reddit as a scaling trick, so they can get millions of users without the need to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators. But it turned out that adding subreddits with volunteer moderators worked better anyway, and this is already what we have on Lemmy, with instance owners and community moderators, so there is really no need for some dystopian scoring of everything someone says.

    • CloverSi@lemmy.comfysnug.spaceEnglish
      52·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been coming to realize how much votes affect the way I interact on Lemmy (and not in a good way). They have their utility of course, but if you’re sorting by new anyway they don’t really have an effect other than, like you said, giving a score to everything everyone says - which I’d really rather not be a part of my interactions as I find it does more harm than good. I hadn’t considered just hiding them entirely though, thanks for bringing that up as a possibility. What do you use to do that? Don’t suppose it’s anything that would work on mobile too?

      • Anafroj@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        You’re welcome. I don’t use mobile myself : do you use an app, or it’s just about opening your Lemmy instance url in a browser? If it’s the later, you can go in the settings and there is a “Show Scores” checkbox. Just uncheck it, hit the “save” button and you’re done. :) This is also where you find the “Sort Type” select box which allows to define default sorting and put it to “New”. It only works for posts on the homepage, though, you have to take the habit to manually click “new” after reading a post to sort its comments (I could have swear it was using the “Sort Type” option before, or maybe just remembering last sort, but it’s not the case anymore).

        • CloverSi@lemmy.comfysnug.spaceEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I use the mobile site, so this is perfect! I’d been through the settings but totally missed that checkbox. Thank you!

          It’s funny, I vaguely remember having comments sorted differently by default too, but I can’t seem to find any actual record of it. Mandela effect? Anyway, I’m hoping the option will be added soon, since I can’t get it to work quite right with a script:

          window.addEventListener("load", function(event) { 
  	document.querySelector('[id$="-new"]').click();
})

          This only seems to work when the page is refreshed for some reason. If you or anyone else happens to know a solution that’d be greatly appreciated, I don’t know javascript well.

          • Anafroj@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Thanks, that’s a good idea.

            The reason why it only works on page reload is because Lemmy is a SPA : it makes it look like you’re browsing several pages, but it’s actually always the same, and it uses javascript to change the url and load new content. So the “load” event, triggered when the current page is done loading, is only triggered once because the page is only changed once. If you wonder why : SPA became commonplace in the 2010s because javascript applications started to get way bigger than previously, and it was helping with page load speed. For a time… because when you make page load faster, people just make it load more things until it’s slow again. :)

            My first reaction was that additionally to binding to the load event, we probably just can bind to the popstate event, which happens when the url is programmatically changed. But my first tests were not successful in doing that. I’ll have a quick look at the source code of Lemmy later today to see if I can solve this.

            • CloverSi@lemmy.comfysnug.spaceEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Thank you for the explanation! That’s wild, I’ve certainly visited SPA sites but I’ve never given much thought to what must be happening under the hood there. I guess it has its use cases but from a user’s pov the quirks can be kinda annoying. Case in point, I see why load wouldn’t do the trick - hope you can find why popstate wouldn’t either (and thanks again)!

              • Anafroj@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                You’re welcome. :) Oh yeah, you probably use a lot of them, they are everywhere, although it’s not obvious to the user. One way to figure it out is to open the browser inspector (usually control + shift + i, same to close it) and look on the “network” tab, which lists all network requests made by the page, to see if this list gets emptied when you click a link (if it’s a real new page, the list is emptied and new requests appear).

                My apologies, I spent an hour on the popstate problem before losing interest and calling it a day. Lemmy uses the inferno frontend framework (a clone of react), which uses the inferno-router router to handle page changes, which uses the history lib to do it, which… uses pushState as I expected it would. And yet, binding on popstate won’t work. 🤷 Maybe I’ll have an other look at it one day if it bugs me enough. :)

    • khannie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      46·
      1 year ago

      It depends how you sort. I’m currently browsing “Top 6 hour” and it’s numerically sorted by number of votes

  • marcos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Technically, yes. But you seem to have missed the point of a social network. (Too absorbed by the commercial ones?)

    If it mattered at all, the platform would be worthless. There is nothing stopping an instance from just lying about those numbers anyway.

  • gullible@kbin.social
    3112·
    1 year ago

    Odd request, could you please downvote the hell out of me? On kbin.social, only certain instances federate their downvotes and I’m curious about which ones they are.

    Edit: just checked from lemmy.world and found 37 downvotes. Only 4 are visible when viewed from kbin.social, and all of them from kbin.social users like myself. I’ve definitely seen downvotes from lemmy users, which makes this a bit puzzling.