Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
A government would only need to get its hands on one instance to havest downvote based dissent data.
Tbh I’d rather we had an up-only based vote system though. Downvotes had a lot to do with the reddit culture that I don’t want taking over Lemmy.
I turned off downvotes and no karma in lemmy is nice. It’s overall a friendlier experience IMO.
Another example of YSK. The lack of a karma system is a fallacy. It’s only because the devs haven’t surfaced the data, as karma, in the user interface.
Going by Reddit standards, your post karma is 54 and your comment karma is 527.
The data is all there and there are alternative clients who do provide it in that manner.
Well you’re no fun 😝 . I get it though, I saw a userscript the other day that could add it to your interface.
Downvotes are part of the reddit culture I miss and what I came to lemmy for. Toxic positivity on reddit, youtube, etc is so annoying. Some content sucks and we should be able to downvote it into oblivion.
Yeah I… wait what?? Toxic positivity…in youtube comments?!
Have I been transported to a parrellel universe where youtube comments aren’t a high 90’s % cesspit of the most vile personalities known to humankind? Does this mean I’m on the good timeline now? Is climate change still poised to make the world super uncomfortable and maybe deadly?
Mhm yeah you are right, but was that how it was used, really? It wasn’t a “This is bad content”-metric. It was a “I don’t agree and I think you suck”-metric. At least quite often
How it was used is how I want it to be used. I want to know the consensus of the community of which I participate. I DO NOT agree that downvote should only be used for comments that “do not contribute”. That’s reddit and I do not want lemmy to be reddit.
Downvote = I think this content is bad
If I’m in an instance for the latest Marvel movie, and the community overwhelmingly hates it, I want to know that by seeing how many downvotes it received.