Dr. Good-vibes
Downvotes seem to only spread negativity and discourage contribution. as others have said, you can just report posts if they’re breaking the rules, so I don’t really get the point of downvotes anyway. Better posts will rise above it even when downvotes are disabled.
no meanies allowed
An idea was brought up that the lemmy software could allow users be make multi-communities (like reddit’s multi-reddits) so that users could group together similar communities from different instances. More specifically I heard of the idea of having an automatic multi-community for every community with the same name across all linked instances.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. I feel like this decision is hurting everyone, but it’s hurting Beehaw users more than the wider fediverse because they’re the ones being isolated from everyone else.
That was a crucially different situation. On Youtube, users didn’t control communities or make the rules, so disliking, even though it had many issues, was the only way to discourage bad content. Things are different here. Individual users have much more control so downvotes aren’t needed like they were on Youtube. You don’t lose much except the downsides.