💯 - it’s not just in the communities you post in, it’s almost everywhere. Downvotes are increasing and engagement is decreasing. 3rd party clients will always support this, I think, so it may not even be possible to remove downvotes. I think I prefer the separate upvote/downvote count option, or make folks votes public like kbin.

Side note: Do you know that active user count in lemmy is based on posts/comments rather than up/down votes?

I think because the # of daily posts now is low enough that a lot of people just look at local, so they see content they don’t enjoy and downvote. Hopefully, it gets busy enough here to avoid that in the future

Thanks! I hadn’t seen this before. I was thinking this would be a fun community idea since the original is gone but I wonder if we’re too small for it to thrive

Here is a discussion from the folks from Sync that adds more context about the challenge. I think it is something the clients have to figure out one at a time

https://lemmy.world/post/4181667

That’s one of the use cases that’s not optimized yet, but there are others. Just some of the ones for desktop alone and there are more for each client:

• gifs hosted on lemmynsfw require multiple click throughs on desktop
• gifs hosted on redgifs or other external hosts have no thumbnail on desktop
• gifs on redgifs open with the rest of the page (I don’t remember if reddit does that)

Seeing as some clients have working examples of making this work, I personally believe it needs to be fixed in lemmy-ui. So I took a look and there are some open feature requests for video embedding but they don’t really cover your use case or the ones I listed but they are similar:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1852

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1215

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/709

I suspect that we (lemmynsfw users) are the ones that are most impacted by this issue and that it is unlikely to make it to the maintainers for a while. If we really wanted to fix it, someone could gather all the issues and make sure that we submit them all to lemmy ui.

A quicker yet more difficult way may be to find out if any of the more open source clients figured out this issue and ask them what they did to fix it. Then try to find someone that could convert that code to whatever lemmy-ui is written in and submit it ourselves to the project. Or just send it to our admins to test it out.