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.

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

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”.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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’m not a fan personally, I’ve never really cared about old Reddit cliches like “the hivemind” or “downvotes = disagreement”. I just really liked being able to tell bad content to fuck off without getting into a flame war. Beehaw’s moderation against hate speech is why I’m still with it despite the no downvote settings

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

No. Downvotes aren’t nothing more than gauge of the specific place climate anyway. Disabling them always looks for me like cheap try of enforcing positivity and openness in places where there is problem with it. Downvotes also help people find their own interests communities.