I want to start by inviting everyone who are looking into this post to check the git commit linked before reading and after that read their current page, it will make more sense.
I think most people don’t understand the fact that Kagi is meta-search engine which literally collect the results of other search engines and display it and add very small amount of results from their index(tecilis).
They are starting to act shady this year(check the attached git commit to see their changes to their documentation page).
People basically pay them to search Yandex and Brave for them.
Before anyone say but privacy, they are closed source and there is a better open source meta search engines which actually respect your privacy and need your donations more than Kagi shareholders.
Open source alternative:
Why in the world would I not want to see downvotes?
You can actually hide them in Voyager for example. Don’t need a special instance for it. You can also set the app to combined instead of individual tally.
To answer your question, upvotes and downvotes are fleeting on lemmy and can be oft meaningless. You could still sort content in posts by metrics, but hide votes, and get insight out of it.
This instance actually drops downvotes before they hit the database, so unless another instance tracks users on different instances, they simply disappear for people on this instance.
Because downvotes are lazy commentary. I’d rather judge for myself what constitutes a bad take and use words to encourage or debate. I don’t need a bunch of angry keyboard warriors poisoning the discourse with voluntary polling.
Plus, seeing a bunch of negative numbers doesn’t make anyone feel good. I would rather Lemmy be a better place than Reddit.
I like this perspective of yours, and while I don’t think I’ll join you on your instance (I take it this was an open invitation, yes?), I’ll look into ways to hide votes on my client.
Although I do wonder, would you prefer everyone to return to long strings of “+1” and “agreed” posts?
Not in particular, but at least I could ostensibly set up a filter (or automod) that hid or removed low-quality comments like that. Removing downvotes is kinda the same effect.
I’m not saying voting should go away entirely. This instance still has upvotes, after all, but Lemmy will just turn into the cynical, pessimistic, self-fallating shithole that Reddit has become if we don’t do anything differently as a community.
(And yes, it was just an open invitation—a reminder, if you will, that The Fediverse is a cool place where you have choices regarding how you experience it.)
+1