Really loving the new experiences here on Lemmy.one. But I’m seeing many subs with off-topic posts. Community downvotes will help overworked mods find and remove such posts. I understand no one likes to be downvoted but it’s a necessary tool for our community and only helps users understand and refine what and where they are to be posting their content.
You’re right that people may downvote for a variety of (possibly bad) reasons, which is why that metric shouldn’t be the only one you use. In addition to just being interesting and informative, I see overall negative sentiment as an indication that the content deserves more scrutiny. Not to discount it, but maybe verify claims that I would have otherwise taken at face value.
Also, the process of manually reading and categorizing comments as positive or negative and then adding them up is much more labour intensive than just looking at a number. I can appreciate that there are some benefits to that approach, but I don’t think it’s worth it considering that there’s a native feature specifically for that purpose.
I guess people in general prefer this way - which is probably why 99% of Lemmy instances have downvotes enabled. You can choose any one of them :)
For me, it makes me more stressed about posting stuff, specially since you can be downvote bombed just for saying you didn’t like X book, or whatever.
It also makes me more stressed when reading comments, for some reason. Either when I see an innocent random comment with negative points - I feel bad for the commenter - or when I end up using it as a disagree button and get more stressed. IDK why.
So for me, not having it is way better. Otherwise I maybe wouldn’t even have created a Lemmy account, and used the “opportunity” (Reddit down in flames) to be less online - which I guess would also be a great outcome.
TLDR: some people prefer no downvotes, but most instances allow them. Your user is already on lemmy.ml, so why do you care?