Disagreement is maybe best communicated by the absence of an upvote?

There is a quote “You can not not communicate” but on the internet you can. If I get no upvotes, I don’t know if no one has seen it or people actively ignored it and it’s a bad advice to feel disagreed on when no upvotes.

I personally feel frustrated when I get downvotes but no comments because I don’t know why I’m downvoted. Some instances here in the lemmyverse (like mine) don’t have downvotes enabled so I don’t even see downvotes.

I think it’s best to engage in a conversation if you disagree in a constructive way and downvote without comment if you feel this is beyond help.

The thing is, downvotes mean whatever the person downvoting feels like they mean. Personally I don’t downvote anything, only upvote.

It would be interesting to have a bot that looks for bad actors—by that I mean users who abuse the downvote and do not use it the way the community agrees that it means. And have a mod review and take action if necessary.

I generally don’t downvote unless somone is being bigoted or hateful.

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I think someone else mentioned the same here, but as I’ve browsed down the opinions, I wonder if it’s good for different communities to have their own subculture on what votes mean.

For sure, outsiders dropping by might vote ‘counter-culturally’ and unhelpfully, but you can get a general sense of understanding in a community.

For r/all-alike stuff I’m sure things are different.

A downvote for me is: this is content i don’t want in my feed

There’s some part of my brain that applies display:none to the upvote/downvote function on every platform.

So if I don’t vote on your content it’s not because I hate it. My brain is just wired to automatically edit out anything that’s not content. Mostly this means ads, but voting features seem to have been caught in the net too.

The nice thing about the fediverse is all my votes are displayed. I generally only down vote a post if it’s way off topic or it’s rife with hate. This also applies to comments.

I generally upvote most things as long as it fits the topic, even if I generally disagree with it.

I only downvote hateful stuff or obvious bots and spam. The same as I do on anything with upvotes and downvotes.

The only times I’ve really been downvoting is if someone is giving out completely incorrect information, like in a support thread or something, and confusing matters. It’s not a personal judgement or anything, just trying to keep things clear for the person asking the question.

If I disagree with a comment, well no biggie. Sometimes it’s worth discussing like adults and sometimes it’s just a subjective opinion. If it’s offensive, I’ll report it and block the user.

The latter. If it’s just disagreement a quick reply is best, and sometimes it gets worked out just fine.

100% you should feel bad. I hope everyone i downvote cries themselves to sleep

Are upvotes for agreement ok though? Or should upvotes be reserved for quality content?

Depends on what kind of post it is.

General discussion threads, sure - ‘up’ = ‘good content’, ‘down’ = ‘irrelevant’. Irrelevant could be because it’s not to do with the matter at hand, it could be hateful, trollish, whatever.

Post asking for a specific fact, like in ye olde askahistorian? Up = correct, down = incorrect. Doesn’t matter how well written or how good the intent is, downvoting for disinformation.

One of the things that Slashdot got right was being able to upvote / downvote with a reason. (Perhaps only being able to upvote / downvote occasionally too, which stops brigading.) Made it possible to filter on why things were good, save ruining your fake internet points when you were mistaken about something as opposed to being an arsehole.

Downvote = other people probably should ignore this post. It isn’t likely to do any good for them. Upvote = hey, everybody! Look at this!