I'm genuinely thrilled by how many here are wetting themselves at the thought of others knowing what or who they downvoted. That is really the extent of "privacy" awareness in most of this thread, wanting to get away with being dicks.

Downvotes are meant to balance out "likes", and minimise people gaming the score system — but let's be honest here, just as often they're a "disagree" button. And sometimes they're just bullying tools — an endless supply of "Kick me!" post-its to be distributed generously wherever.

Hot fix: end downvotes. Just yank them out of the system. Actually my preferred solution.

More realistic fix: make votes transparent, encourage accountability.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 15 points 3 months ago

Hot fix: end downvotes. Just yank them out of the system. Actually my preferred solution.

This is already possible - just go to an instance that has downvotes disabled, there are plenty of them.

[–] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 15 points 3 months ago

Hot fix: end downvotes. Just yank them out of the system. Actually my preferred solution.

God no. Websites with just upvotes have some of the worst threads because a small pocket of stubborn idiots keep upvoting each other.

[–] SomeGuy69@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Downvotes are one of the most important indicator if a post is trolling or nonsense. If it only shows the total, you lose all sense of perspective. A post could have 2 upvotes and 1 downvote or 10000 upvotes and 9999 downvoted, this massively changes the context of a post. Also why should I not use a vote to say I disagreed with something? I don't always want to write a detailed explanation, especially not when people reply with "did an AI write this?" or simply ignore what I said. Most cases are not like your comment where there's a valid reason to explain something.

[–] halm@leminal.space 1 points 3 months ago

I don’t always want to write a detailed explanation, especially not when people reply with “did an AI write this?"

No, much better that they have to wonder in private "did a not just downvote me?" 🙂 But I do appreciate you replying, much more than I would a vote in either direction.