Downvotes can be useful in certain contexts, like when you visit a thread and are looking for factual information, such as the answer to a tech question. I don't want to accidentally follow someone's bad advice because the bad advice didn't have any downvotes nor any responses as to why it was wrong.

It's not perfect, but voting is a quick, often effective method of fact checking.

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It’s more of a vibe check than a fact check. But I think it’s definitely useful for the network to self moderate since mods are pretty much entirely voluntary on Lemmy.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

Just to give a concrete example, there are a couple blatantly political posts on !fediverse. Do they belong there? Absolutely not. But by the time I saw them days later, the damage was done and they were already taken care of by downvotes. Should I really mod remove a week old post with 50 downvotes? The discussion there about why it didn't belong was fine, and didn't need to be hidden further.