It often makes me sad seeing some posts receiving downvotes, even though I know it’s from random people across Lemmy instances who probably aren’t furries.
I could disable downvotes which would make it so that they’re ignored by the instance and the count would only reflect the amount of upvotes. But, that also means that Yiffit users wouldn’t be able to use downvotes anywhere else.
What do you think?
Coming from Beehaw, which always had downvotes disabled, I don’t think downvotes are necessary for a healthy Lemmy instance. More popular content will naturally surface by virtue of having more upvotes; there’s no need to have a mechanism to “pull down” less popular content.
I also think that downvotes are too easily abused or weaponized. It’s trivial to downvote bomb all of a user’s or a community’s posts. Without downvotes, to achieve the same effect, you’d have to upvote every single other post that exists.