I understand Beehaw’s policy on downvotes: I’ve not thought of it long enough to say whether I agree or not (well, I guess I should also study some psychology and sociology to really form a meaningful opinion on that), but I have, in principle, no problems with it.
However, in some communities that are not on Beehaw (and thus not necessarily agree with Beehaw policies) user downvotes work as kind-of a “soft” moderation and I feel like I could better contribute to those communities if I could downvote posts/comments that I find distasteful or inappropriate but that the mod won’t remove (I know I can just reply with a reprimand, but that’s a lot of work and doesn’t reduce the reach of the inappropriate post/comment).
Now here’s my question: are downvotes being disabled on “foreign” communities because of some technical limitation or is the idea that Beehaw’s users should not be able to downvote, regardless of how communities may work?
I disagree that pushing back has no effect. In fact I would argue that it does more than a downvote because it’s much more clear WHY the comment is trash and shouldn’t have been made.
It wasn’t my intention to imply that it has no effect: the points I wanted to raise are that it takes a lot of work (that is, if you write a meaningful refutation: childish bickering of course requires very low effort) and that the effects it does have do not include making the original post/comment less visible (what I called “soft” moderation).