Recently, many of our anti-Zionists posts have been downvoted to oblivion by liberals. As hexberians realized a while back, downvotes only help liberals since they are more numerous and they don’t need to engage in discourse. I am proposing to just get rid of downvotes and instead engage in discourse on content that we disagree on.
All the big tech platforms, twitter, youtube, fb, have removed the ability to dislike over the years. Why do they do this? Because it drives up engagement.
Now not only can you not just downvote when someone says some reactionary shit like “only whites should own property” with 10 likes, but you have to write an essay against them because it’s appalling that no one seemed to dislike it.
Reddit removed the ability to see downvote counts years ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually they follow suit with the rest of big tech and remove it.
Downvotes from liberals should be worn like a badge, but they’ve mostly chosen to pre-emptively block us, so it hasn’t been a big problem. These points ultimately mean nothing and ppl should just go into their settings and hide all vote scores if they’re bothered by downvotes.
Downvotes from liberals should be worn like a badge […] These points ultimately mean nothing
Yup. Points only really matter to me insomuch as they make Hot & Top actually work by raising the popular and squelching the unpopular.
Downvotes from liberals should be worn like a badge
This would be easier if the algorithm actually didn’t drop posts to the bottom of the pitt due to the libs downvotes.
That’s fair, and that could be handled in the lemmy codebase, IE putting a minimum score instead of the algorithm kicking things off the feed. You might need to open an issue for that one.
Ok, I will do that. How should I phrase the request?
Maybe something like, “don’t kick posts with a negative score off completely off the feed” or something.
I can’t leave this as just an upvote. Thank you for the clear position in the negative. I was really worried when I saw this thread. Hexbear has many wonderful people, but I greatly prefer the culture here.
I couldn’t agree more, I love the way the Grad has been, most of the downvotes I received have served 2 purposes: 1.) A constructive criticism from someone who has a disagreement with one of many points I make in a post, 2.)funny downvotes from libs. I honestly appreciate both of these for very different reasons
I’ve been trying to figure out a way to say this. I tend to ignore them but on longer posts I do check. And if I get down votes I reread what I wrote and see if it needs correcting. This has led to fixing mistakes and to rethinking theoretical errors/issues.
Sometimes a comrade might not know quite what’s wrong with what you said but they notice something is problematic. A down vote can express that without stressing over how to phrase it or about being a debate pervert.
Even when I conclude that I am right, I’ve sharpened my thinking because I trust comrades’ down votes enough to reconsider the matter. That was easier to decide before the Reddit exodus. Things have calmed down since then as the reactionaries have better learned their place and realised that they can’t abide dissent so have either individually or instance-wide blocked us for daring to be on the right side of history.
Of course, if I say something like Free Palestine, any down votes are a badge of pride. So when I’m obviously right and get down voted, it’s easy to ignore.
Well said
Could reactionary comments just be removed instead and serial reactionary offenders just be blocked from the communities? Downvotes dont really add anything.
If you remove the ability for people to express that they dislike something, it makes our moderation work 10x more difficult.
Let’s say some shit comment gets posted and has 3 upvotes but dozens of replies. Does that mean people liked it, or didn’t? This is exactly what big tech companies want, to platform reactionary or unwanted takes, and forcing ppl to engage, rather than just downvoting and moving on.
Not every like or dislike needs an essay as a justification.
Strongly agree. It also leads if you’ll notice on hex bear to lots of thread clogging, useless comments like people using an emote called down-bear to express the same in much more space. It’s ridiculous. The urge never leaves even if the button is removed. It doesn’t result in forcing more education, it just frustrates and overwhelms those capable of education.
There’s a spectrum of wrong between mod action (including removal and banning) and simply being wrong on something.
Yep, its clear their users are using those emote replies as a substitute for downvotes. People want to downvote comments sometimes (express disapproval with little effort), and will do that in the only ways available to them.
But wouldnt you guys know which comments are the problem ones based on reports?
Reports are helpful to mods yes (although ppl use them far less than downvotes, because just like a response, a report requires a reason), but since they’re invisible to other users, you have no choice but to respond with an essay, and drive up pointless engagement.
If anything, we should be giving users more ways to express their preference, not less. Big tech would love to do away with all forms of preference, but they keep upvotes because it at least is better than the hell of old-school forums where you had to read through hundreds of pages before you found helpful or interesting content.
I think removing downvotes leads to a culture of viciously petty, shallow, dunks in lieu of downvotes.
I don’t buy the argument that removing downvotes is better for anyone - they’re just replaced by emote spamming.
I like being federated with hexbear, but don’t enjoy interacting with them on topics we disagree on.
I like that the culture here is more serious, with people that either engage seriously or just downvote and move on.
I like that we typically trust one or two people to argue against reactionary arguments, and downvote/upvote in support.
Individuals can turn off visible vote count in jerboa, so I don’t see a need to make a change for the instance.
You’ve expressed my feelings exactly. If one can simply downvote a bad opinion and move on when one doesn’t have time or perhaps links handy to debunk it you have a civil situation where one uses such signaling mechanisms to show incorrectness.
When one can’t, there’s anger, frustration and once you open that reply box and start typing it’s easy not to stop, there is a tendency among many with contentious topics to go off, to get angry, to say things that don’t really help the situation, that are vicious, petty, cruel, even perhaps dangerous as I’ve seen people here who’ve made statements that might not be first amendment protected on the grounds of “real threats”. It becomes instead of a nice civil “suppress/disagree with button” situation a “how can I shut this person down with words, how can I hurt them, how can I silence them” situation. That or just spamming low effort emotes which has the same sentiment problem and clogs up threads (and wastes scrolling time) with lots of redundant and low effort, low value reaction content.
I think overall it decreases quality and frankly I really, really, really do not want this place to turn into hexbear. They have decent politics but they really are as abrasive as scotch pads and as able to maintain being serious for more than a minute as Mel Brooks (not at all).
I am truly thankful Maud’Dibber is so sensible on this.
This comment currently has a 22/24 upvoted to downvoted count, without any replies.
Thanks for proving my point.
Edit: and now it shows 0 downvotes. Idk.
As an outside observer, I will state that I was pretty strongly against removing downvotes until we actually did, and it only took me about a month until I turned on my position. Removing downvotes is good, actually
Yep, agreed. Removing downvotes was the best idea we ever had, and they should be removed entirely from the Lemmy codebase.
No. Go live on hex bear if you need that.
I need downvotes to push down incorrect, idealist, frankly liberal opinions of which a not insignificant amount come from the aforementioned instance.
We either get rid of downvotes and adopt a more brutal moderation policy that sees any liberalism or idealism result in a removal and quick trip to a permanent ban which means more work for mods or we like communists accept liberals occasionally coming in with their little downvotes while utilizing them ourselves as a discipline measure to as a community hold to account liberal, idealist, reactionary, and otherwise wrong opinions that otherwise threaten to poison the minds of learning comrades.
I see this kind of poison frequently on hex bear and frankly it does not encourage anything but low effort, lower the bar emote spamming which does little to measure actual community opinion (a dozen idealists may upvote a bad comment while only 3 people bother to put down bear emojis which are clunky anyways and amount to discourse clogging “same” comments which add nothing.) Downvotes are the elegant solution and so far especially with our recent defederation from world the liberals are not near outnumbering us.
Democratic participation and discipline includes disagreement without elaboration especially when dealing with many opinions which are frankly unstudied and by people who otherwise should have no right to speak.
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I would have downvoted your comment.
However, I’m posting from Hexbear and cannot downvote; I am forced to type out ‘this is a post that is the opposite of good’. And tell you why, first a brief preface.
I didn’t come here to argue or make waves, I don’t care what other instances do in general, but I saw Hexbear mentioned and I thought I would check it out the discourse.
As someone who has used Hexbear for years, I think removing downvotes has been beneficial at best and not an issue at worst. As others have said, you can still tell the difference between a +25 likes post versus a 1-3 like post, at a glance.
The specific reason I am “downvoting” your post is because you said -
… otherwise wrong opinions that otherwise threaten to poison the minds of learning comrades.
I see this kind of poison frequently on hex bear and frankly it does not encourage anything but low effort, lower the bar emote spamming which does little to measure actual community opinion (a dozen idealists may upvote a bad comment while only 3 people bother to put down bear emojis which are clunky anyways and amount to discourse clogging “same” comments which add nothing.)
I would like to disagree with your description of “poision frequently posted on Hexbear”. I do not know what you are referring to, or what your definition of “frequently” is, the mods there are swift and diligent. This caught me off-guard, really don’t know what you are referring to.
Secondly, at Hexbear there really is no spamming of the “downbear” emoji, infact I forgot we had that until a few days ago, some would say we have too many emojis (+2000).
Thirdly, I am not trying to further the great “Hexbear Rift” with needless trolling, quite the opposite, just wanted to disagree with statements I perceive as false.
I’m glad we are federated, I do like looking at more content. Downvote me to the Marinara Trench, I won’t see it! Thanks for coming to my FED talk!
Honestly. I’m a little frustrated by how many hexbear users are in this thread. We don’t go to your instance and push our system. And no they’re not all replying to me or here because of me. You say they’re here to give input, I say they feel like they’re here to cajole and try and push a certain sentiment that may not represent the sentiment of the native userbase.
This is a meta discussion about how we run our instance and I think those who should have input are its users, not lemmy.worlders, not fedditers, and not hexbears.
In my opinion this post has been brigaded by hexbear users (and I would bet if admins took a look at who was upvoting all the comments in favor of removing downvotes they’d find a large amount if not plurality of them were from hexbear users).
Compared to hexbear we’re somewhat smaller of an instance so all of you piling in here on us insisting your way is the best way and that there are no problems what-so-ever is very obvious and jarring. Honestly I do think instances need to start designating a special meta community that doesn’t federate, doesn’t allow federated users just for feedback and local instance community decisions and discussion but that’s a whole other thing.
As to not spamming downbear, this is kind of a dishonest technicality, sure, you have lots of other emotes that are spammed, people spamming Stalin shooting people and a dozen other different disagree button emotes, the downbear is rather tame.
And frankly I think there’s also some opinions just not voiced. It isn’t that everyone who would downvote instead resorts to emotes, many just don’t disagree, they maybe start typing then realize how exhausting it might be to get into a back and forth and delete it and move on. And that’s a problem too. Because there are comrades who are tired, who struggle with mental health issues, who work long hours and don’t want to get into unfruitful, toxic back and forths with potentially dishonest people, gish gallopers, debate perverts, etc.
I’m not going to conduct a study to disprove your points or illustrate mine. And this is kind of what I’m talking about in terms of the perceived abrasiveness of hexbear as a culture that isn’t helped at all by the removal of downvotes and IMO spurred on by it. You don’t use mean words or language but many there brusquely deny, disagree, dismiss. I would like to assume you are in good faith and you probably are, you probably just see things differently than me. That said a few years ago when the whole CTH refugee situation was going on I had numerous interactions with some promoters where they blatantly lied to my face, ignored archive/picture evidence I gave them to the contrary, and just tried to steamroll over me and my problems by continuing to deny, dismiss, disagree, and gaslight. So I am afraid that interaction still colors my feelings a little though I understand there are many decent people there and I am sure you’re one of them. So forgive me if what I wrote is unintentionally harsh but I also haven’t had good experiences when producing the goods.
I don’t want to get into a fight about hexbear. I really don’t see anything served by me airing out specific problems and making a call-out post so I don’t really want to go searching for problematic comments then bringing them to you as proof. I’ll just note my account is very old here, I’m not some new troublemaker.
I’ll also note we don’t have the issue hexbear had with trans users and their posts being downvoted. We don’t have a problem with bigots. Our requirements for getting an account are strict. So asking to remove downvotes is punishing the users for problems with other instances which our admins are already handling with limited defederations and other actions. So to suggest we need the same medicine comes off as very pushy.
I must admit it comes off as sort of culty/arrogant to me personally. As people way too eager to impose their way on everyone else when those people don’t have the issues that led to it in the first place and have a vastly different culture. This isn’t a moral issue either where it makes sense to be animated about like human rights, Gazans being killed, animal rights, etc.
It feels like trying to impose a culture and all respect to hexbear, there is a reason I am not on that site these days and it’s because I like the culture here better and I’d like to keep it. If you like your culture there better than here that’s fine, I’m happy for you to keep it and happy for you to not have downvotes if that’s what you like.
I am forced to type out ‘this is a post that is the opposite of good’. And tell you why
I’ve seen this used as an argument both for and against downvotes. On the pro side, it will encourage people to post and actually explain what they find problematic. On the anti side, it gets rid of what someone else in this thread called the right to disagreement without elaboration. Sometimes you just want to be able to say someone’s wrong without needing to humor them with a response.
With this dimension of the problem at least, neither choice is better in all situations, and the correct choice will vary between instance userbases.
I completely agree every instance should be tailored to the needs of their individual community.
It was not my intention to weigh in on the pros vs. cons of downvotes, I checked out the thread to see what others thought of a ‘key Hexbear feature’; the main reason I made the post was to push back against what I felt was an unfair criticism of Hexbear’s content.
Kinda got a little meta as I was forming it in my mind and I ran with it.
Downvotes serve a purpose for us as well. It lets us downvote liberals and show them their shit takes are not accepted here. Some will downvote, others will engage, and both mechanisms combined send a stronger signal to libs.
So keep in mind it’s a two-way street, we can downvote on federation as well.
Secondly I think we evolved differently from Hexbear and what makes sense for them doesn’t necessarily makes sense for us. The only time we’ve had a downvote problem was when libs made bots from some defunct instance to mass downvote. The only problem it leads to, in our case, is that our posts are made non-visible to other comrades on the local instance. We defed from the instance in question and everything is restored.
Personally I like that votes are not displayed so prominently unlike on Reddit. I don’t really look at my score after posting a comment, whereas on Reddit you had any downvote on your post sent to you front and center. But I understand others may feel more impacted by downvotes.
Right now these are the only two solutions for Lemmy, as no others are implemented (like removing federation downvotes, weighting local votes differently, etc). Either we enable downvotes, or we disable them, but we can’t do in-betweens at this time. I think these are good ideas generally though (especially if you browse by local, federation votes should not necessarily be taken into account but could be if you see the same post on the All view).
Generally we’re on top of getting to reports pretty quickly, especially when it comes to libs. So whether you downvote, engage, or just report (ideally you should report ASAP) they will get banned and their comments deleted pretty quickly. So that’s what I recommend above all, keep making reports 😁 as for downvote bots, like I said it’s only happened a few times but once again, please do report it to us in some way (you can report a botted post for example and in the reason explain it was botted) and we’ll get to it. Usually these bots come from small defunct instances that have no moderation, so the fix is as simple as defeding them.
Secondly I think we evolved differently from Hexbear and what makes sense for them doesn’t necessarily makes sense for us.
Socialism with Lemmygrad characteristics
Shitposting with Lemmygrad characteristics
Personal opinion time, I strongly disagree with removing downvotes on LG because it disenfranchises comrades who lack time or energy for comments.
sure if you disagree with something you should leave a comment explaining why. But the person who’s too burnt out from living under capitalism isn’t going to want to do that, and the person with executive dysfunction who just wanted to scroll for a minute wouldn’t want to either.
In my moderation and in my leisure scrolling, I know what kind of discourse a post is just by looking at the point total. If it’s upvoted well, it’s usually good shit. If it’s downvoted to hell, the poster either needs an explanation or mod action. This also helps the average scroller, if they see a post or a comment has been downvoted a ton, they’re probably not going to pay much attention to it. Also, from a first-person perspective, if you said something and got more downvotes than up, it’s probably time to self-crit. That’s a valuable tool.
TLDR: downvotes are valuable.
@darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml calls this below, disagreement without elaboration. That’s a really apt way to put the solution to the burnout you described above, that we often feel when we’re forced to engage with reactionary content when we don’t have the energy to at that moment.
I agree with this as well. I hope between Hexbear and Lemmygrad because at the end of the day I get tired of having to read every terrible take on Hexbear sometimes and at least over here I can slap a downvote of some idiot lib and move on. Or when I see a comment with heavy downvotes I know it’s either a dogshit lib take or a good take that’s pissed off the libs. Usually though there aren’t enough libs to counter us. If ppl don’t like us having downvotes the they can hop on Hexbear. Not every instance has to be the same. That’s what’s nice about federation and diversity of coms.
I really agree with this, especially as one of said people with executive dysfunction who just wants to scroll lol
It’s also especially nice to not have to reply to contribute to disagreement when you’re like me and get loads of anxiety from confronting people negatively, especially bad faith libs who have the tendency to attack 😅
To hear incorrect views without rebutting them is the sixth type of liberalism
I should be able to downvote anyone, but no one should be able to downvote me. this is dialectics or something.
An additional display option to show local and federated (down)votes separately would be welcome, mainly because the grad’s vetting process means I value the opinions of grad members more.
If we remove downvotes we will no longer be able to downvote libs who wander in here and shit on the floor.
Downvoting is the cowards way out. We either engage on discourse with them or report them if they are violating the rules.
Consider that that’s easily said when one isn’t on the hook for doing the moderation labor.
If we had more emotes I’d be fine to get rid of downvotes. But not every lib deserves a real response. In the absence of PPB a downvote is our current option.
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Instead of downvoting, could you just ignore their comment? Libs take way more advantage of downvotes to sway the algorithm their way than we do and they use downvotes against us way more than we use downvotes against them. Aren’t we better than them?
The issue is that ignoring them appears as tacit approval to those not in the know.
If any place need to get rid of downvotes it’s lemmy.world (and broader all of lemmy) Libs have that terrible redditoid custom of going to someone profile and downvote everything there, which makes downvotes basically useless as information. And it’s mostly .world thing since my lemmy account is downed to hell and my lemmygrad account which .world cannot see, isn’t.
I will mention @CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml right now I see two posts by regular users on the Palestine issue that are very mysteriously dunked down into negative digits.
I think we may have an issue of an influence operation targeting our instance (specifically posts on occupied Palestine). Is there a way an admin could look into this? Maybe check where these downvotes are coming from, maybe a defederation against a brigade/downvote bot instance could be in order. Or at least banning cowardly fascist users doing it.
Otherwise I guess we could just ignore it. I’d rather not buckle to removing downvotes as that’s giving them power over us and removing a tool but if a less busy admin could look into it manually it might be nice to frustrate their efforts.
There is the possibility of a compromise here too. Weighting of votes by instance. With home instance users having full weight to their votes and federated users getting their votes weighted to 0.33, 0.50, 0.66, 0.75 or something. Perhaps as an admin setting.
My post about the imperialist massacre at Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital had 83 downvotes yesterday. Now they are mysteriously gone.
We got the instance that was mass down voting and defeded, so it’s possible it removed their downvotes.
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It is worth discussing whether it is a worthwhile feature for Lemmy to allow making a community local-only or something like that.
Don’t downvotes from other instances get tallied up even if local downvoting is disabled?
I’m also very much against disabling it, both because (I say this with love) Hexbear tends to get very polluted by extremely similar comments sometimes, but also because it’d prevent me from seeing downvotes when using federated instances.
I also think that it suits the more serious tone of this instance. Hexbearians can have fun dogpiling on libs all day, but I’m pretty sure most here are too grumpy to enjoy expressing their disagreement in the replies of every lib that wanders in here. And it helps reduce the emoji spam, because I really don’t like seeing my walls of text interrupted by images of pooping pigs.
Do we know for sure that the emoji spam on Hexbear is due to the downvote policy? It seems to me like it could also just be explained by accidents of history and community focus/culture.
Following the ban of /r/chapotraphouse, the community spent a bit of time on Discord. After chapo.chat was made, a bunch of custom emojis were made and then we just kinda kept making them.
anyone can submit an emoji for consideration, it’s pretty rad!
Feel we should only allow Lemmygrad comrades to vote. Vetting helps weed out much lib-shit.
From the river to the sea! Free Palestine! Fuck Israel, the US, and NATO!
In solidarity,
- Comrade bleepingblorp
After reading all the comments on this thread I think it might be good to make some changes but I don’t think removing downvotes should be one of them. Here are some proposals from me:
- Deanonymize voting so everyone can see who’s casting what vote and where
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- or maybe deanonymize for the OP only
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- or maybe tally up votes by instance rather than specifying users
- change the sorting algorithms to favor the votes of this instance above others
- remove votes from federated instances altogether
- implement a dedicated lib button in addition to upvote and downvote. A libvote, if you will. Use it to tell someone they’re being libby
