My wonderful co-admin @supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone has made a modification to the downvote system. It’s not currently enabled, but if we were to turn it on, downvotes would be available for use, but they would weigh 5 times less than an upvote.
Which is to say, it would take 5 downvotes to counter an upvote. This would let downvotes have an impact on what appears in the hot topics sort, but hopefully mitigate some of the more negative impacts of downvoting.
Are there any strong objections from Blahaj Lemmy users to enabling downvotes with this modification?
Totally fine with this, but I’m curious how weights/disabling downvotes works? Like does the 5:1 downvotes weight apply to downvotes everywhere, even on other instances that have normal weights? Or is it just for communities that are hosted on blahaj.zone?
This would be a global change to the way our instance displays downvotes. Anywhere downvotes would apply, they would still apply, but with 5 times less weight.
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone it’s global and it would display on our instance like:
Score: 4.2. Upvotes: 5. Downvotes: 4
Other instances’ “hot ranking” is unaffected by our change and they are free to rank and score up and down votes however they please.
Would this mean we see the actual number of upvotes & downvotes just with downvotes counting for less in the rankings? Or would that “downvote” displayed also be 1/5th of the real number?