Egg on my face for not realizing this sooner, but because I've been primarily using lemmy through Sync I didn't realize until yesterday that my current home instance has downvoting disabled. Apparently with lemmy that's a universal setting -- no one can downvote content in any community on the instance, but also accounts on that instance can't downvote content anywhere else.
Sync still displays the downvote button regardless, and will still highlight it in blue if you click it. It wasn't until I learned about Reddthat's policy and started testing how Sync was handling it that I saw the downvote doesn't "stick" -- a refresh shows the downvote button no longer highlighted and no change in the score's content. It's silently failing while in the moment looking like it succeeded.
I've mostly been using the Sync app (which shows a downvote option everywhere), so I didn't notice the lack of downvoting until I was spending a lot of time on desktop yesterday and saw there are actually no downvote buttons anywhere 😮 on Reddthat.
I've since tracked down what seems to be the Reddthat policy discussion around this issue, which also made clear that even if I downvote content from another instance through a 3rd-party app like Sync, because I'm doing it from an account on Reddthat (which has downvoting disabled), my downvote doesn't go through!
This sucks. 🙁 Downvoting is an essential tool for users to help keep their communities on-topic and discourage bad behavior. It lets people take action against ignorance or bigotry without feeding the trolls; minimize people trying to derail discussions or be obnoxious in the comments; and prevent memes, sensationalism, and low-effort posts from flooding communities meant for thoughtful discussion.
It's unfortunate that lemmy doesn't support disabling downvotes just within specific communities yet, so this wouldn't have to be such an all-or-nothing policy, but as-is this means making Reddthat my home instance has restricted my options and given me less of a voice everywhere within the lemmyverse.
@ticoombs@reddthat.com, is there any chance this policy will be reconsidered? So many comments in the previous discussion seemed to agree that downvotes are a valuable and desired feature. It doesn't seem like that feedback has resulted in any kind of policy change yet though. Was a specific decision made after that discussion to keep voting disabled, or has it just been stuck in a wait-and-see state? Would it be possible to change this?
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