Right now, downvotes (reduces) don’t federate to (and from?) Kbin instances. This lack of federation makes the downvote counter really inaccurate—a comment that looks like it’s +10 might be -15 when you look at it from lemmy.world.
This leaves me with a few questions:
- Is downvote federation going to be implemented?
- If so, is it a priority or something that’ll happen much further down the line?
- If not, will downvoting be removed?
If you want to get the mods to take something down, that’s what the report button is for. Downvotes shouldn’t also play that role, especially if they stay as downvotes. That down arrow is inevitably going to be used by a lot of people to express mere disagreement.
I don’t want downvote for disagreement. Learn to debate a point and then leave it. Downvote for disagreement just discourages people from holding forth on complex unpopular positions ,even if they are correct. Of course it is most abused in politics where we can’t objectively give a correct answer, but elsewhere i’ve seen real experts downvoted when they point out the popular narrative doesn’t fit the facts.
I completely agree with you, but as long as there’s have a down arrow button, there are going to be a lot of people who use it for disagreement — especially when the up arrow button is used for agreement. To my knowledge, it’s not as much of a thing among kbin.social users (likely since votes are public), but it’s definitely there, and I imagine poor downvote use will only become more prominent as the instance grows. Thus, it’d be really bad for some people to use and interpret downvotes as a pseudo-report button, as not everyone will use it that way.
EDIT: Typo fix.