Respectfully, I am aware of the intended function. My point is nothing to do with the intended function, it's to do with how downvotes are misused in practice. I already knew that people would misuse the downvote function simply because I disagree with the majority opinion.
Fortunately, it's not a binary choice. There is a place for people on the fediverse who like to have downvotes. There is also a place for people who do not. :)
I've tried a few different browsers over the years but I always seem to end up coming back to Firefox because of its customisability. I'm not especially bothered about speed, I'm very happy to bog my browser down with more addons than I care to admit to, and leave a ridiculous number of tabs open. No other browser even comes close to allowing me to do such silly things.
I have searched in vain for a source for my "every 8 hours" claim, so please do take it with a pinch of salt. I've wanted an excuse to get an O2DS for a while, and now I have one, to test this out. So thanks! :D
I see your points, and they do make sense, but I respectfully disagree with your conclusion. My reasoning is that, from my experience, a downvote has no nuance. A reply saying "this is wrong and here's why" with a hundred upvotes is useful. A downvote is basically the equivalent of flicking a peanut.
I disagree. Downvotes rarely add anything of value to the discussion that can't be expressed simply by not upvoting. There's no nuance to a downvote, and they're so often misused to the extent that I'm glad not to have to worry about them.
Having been here for a couple of days I now feel that downvotes are a bad idea. They don't add anything of value to the discussion that cannot be expressed by simply not upvoting. If they must be re-enabled (which I disagree with) I think they should be at least an order of magnitude different, 20:1 or even 50:1, just to make brigading harder. I don't miss them from Reddit, and if they're enabled at 5:1, I'd consider finding another instance where they're just disabled - but hey, I'm new, so I might be missing something.
I'm on an instance that has downvoting disabled. I can't downvote. But, I also only see upvotes, and posts even on other instances are sorted by raw upvotes (not upvotes minus downvotes). If you downvote something, it looks exactly like if you'd not voted at all.
Hope you have a wonderful time! Pride doesn't happen where I am until later in the year so I'm kinda holding off for now, and just being my usual level of delightfully-queer. :)
In which case, please allow me to pre-emptively welcome you to the UK! I hope you enjoy your time here. :)