Just a suggestion, bad posts get reported or removed, good faith posts get responses.
The paranoria/low effort trolling its creating is having a detrimental effect on discussion, better to just remove the ability for low effort trolls to effect conversation.
I could be persuaded tbh.
There may be some vulnerable comrades whose mental health suffers if they are down voted too much.
Plus, I wonder if down voting is one of the ways those low effort trolls rile us up. Post about China, 20 instant downvotes, you know reactionaries are watching challenge accepted. That kind of thing?
Of course, they could just comment with something asinine but that takes more effort and it gives us an opportunity to respond. When it’s just numbers, it’s hard to do more than flail.
I commented the other day against the introduction of Reddit-like coins to the Lemmy software because it would create the wrong incentives and could lead to commodification. I wonder if down-voting is similar in that regard? Up-voting is slightly different because it’s a low effort way to show support; so appears to be inherently positive (I think up votes should stay meaningless in terms of e.g. karma, though).
I wonder if there’s any public literature on the introduction of features like these and the addictiveness of social media? If down votes were originally designed e.g. to make FaceZine more profitable, there might be an argument in that history for removing that feature from a communist sphere.