I think they are usually a good thing. Someone says something incorrect or mean they get downvoted. But like anything else they can be misused as well. I do remember getting downvoted for posts I couldn’t see anything wrong with, but life and people are like that and once I made peace with that fact I was fine with it.

I’m actually kind of disappointed in how popular Beehaw is becoming for this very reason. The whole spirit of federated social media is the decentralization of ownership and authority, and yet so many people are flocking to the instance where the judgement of what is or isn’t acceptable is concentrated to a few moderators. I don’t disagree with much of Beehaw’s stated ideology, except maybe for their condemnation of rationalism, but it still seems like an elitist mindset to have the values of the community determined by a select few. I think that ideally mods should be there for spam and hate speech and that everything else should essentially be community moderated via up and down votes. Limiting the community’s voting ability in favor of strict moderation inevitably leads to power-tripping moderators eventually. Sure, you can move the community to a different instance if it gets bad, but I’m not totally convinced that that’s as much of a zero-cost operation as people make it out to be. Especially if you’re talking about relocating a large community from a very popular instance.

Here’s hoping that all of the Lemmy communities grow into healthy, thriving environments away from the destructive financial interests of traditional social media, but please, let the people have their downvotes.

Yum tasty downvotes. Its only the internet, it can be very fickle.

They’re alright. I think it’s good to have server owners decide whether to disable or not. For Beehaw it works well as it promotes and encourages discussion positively.

Downvoting misinformation and off-topics is good, but oftentimes it’s used for disagreement which isn’t good imo.

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I love them. It’s really good for communities to have a way for people to express opposition other than posting a response, and even better when it results in those controversial comments being de-boosted. A lot of other social networks would be much better off if they allowed that sort of reaction from their users.

Used to show relevancy. If the post or comment isn’t relevant then I downvote it. Otherwise I upvote it

The buttons should be either 'insightful ’ or ‘funny’

And those should be the only options you get.