Some Lemmy instances (e.g. Beehaw) do not support down votes. When an instance does support down-votes, authors often get zero feedback with the down votes which ultimately supports obtuse expression, shenanigans and haters. The status quo suffers from these problems:
- down voters do not need to read the comment they are down voting
- down votes empower non-moderators to suppress comments and posts
- some communities struggle to get content because of some malicious down voters who down vote every post to discourage activity and effectively sabotage the community; voting privacy shields malicious down-voters from discovery and supports their attack
- silent down votes are non-constructive
- some people make heavy use of down votes to suppress civil comments purely because of disagreement; other (more civil) users only use down votes to suppress uncivil dialog. This inequality ultimately manifests to reduce civility.
- transparency: kids and adults are accessing the same forums and adults are blind as to whether down votes are coming from kids (the rationale can reveal this)
The fix:
An instance admin should be able to flip a switch that requires every down vote to collect a 1-line rationale from the voter. These one-liners should be visible to everyone on a separate page. Upvotes do not need rationale. So instance owners should have 3 configuration options:
- down votes disabled (beehaw)
- down votes require rationale (proposed)
- down votes out of control (the most common status quo)
Perhaps overkill, but it might be useful if a moderator can cancel or suppress uncivil down votes.
BTW, the reason this enhancement request is not in the official bug trackers:
- Lemmy’s bug tracker is in MS Github (#deleteGithub)
- Kbin’s bug tracker is on codeberg, who silently deleted my account without warning or reason, and #Codeberg reg forces a graphical CAPTCHA (which fails on my non-graphical browser).
#lemmyBug #KbinBug
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