Liberals: we support free speech

also liberals: don’t allow you to downvote content you don’t like

  • frippa@lemmy.ml
    241·
    2 years ago

    Downvotes are esssential to understand if a post is misleading/plain false, just like the meme “following x tutorial on youtube after they removed dislikes”

    • CoinOperatedBoi@lemmy.ml
      11·
      2 years ago

      The communities which have content that requires factual accuracy ought to leave that moderation and the equivalent community involvement can be done (and is more effectively done) with comments. Downvotes lack context. It’s like seeing a downvotes question on StackOverflow. The reason why it was downvoted isn’t always clear

  • commet-alt-w
    11·
    2 years ago

    their mods are very scared of the words “neoliberal” and “imperialist”

    • Star Wars Enjoyer OPA
      12·
      2 years ago

      one of their rules prevents users from asking for sources, too

      There’s no way to fairly define their “no sealioning” rule. Sealioning is when someone tries to shut down a debate by demanding sources… but like, that’s only a problem if someone makes an unsourced claim.

      Which, like, ya know. This rule creates a situation where unsourced claims that benefit the echochamber of the mods will never be forced to provide any proof of their claims, while ones that don’t benefit the mods will be brigaded with claims of “fake news”. This rule will only protect their echochamber, not make their discussions more civil.

  • 201dberg
    91·
    2 years ago

    In fairness, and I’m not defending shit ass beehaw, but Hexbear also doesn’t have downvotes. It was mainly due to brigading. We don’t have as big of an issue with that here due to the way accounts are made but over there it was a bit bigger of a problem. It also forces actual engagement as you can’t just downvotes and not say anything. If you disagree you have to voice it. Which is also I feel why banning seems to happen a lot more over there lol. It seems like there’s often a lot of “friendly fire” over there sometimes because people can get heated over really minor shit that could have just been a quick downvote to disagree and then move on.

    I’m glad we have downvotes here though. And I like that instead of a static vote number it shows the actual number of up and down votes.

      • 201dberg
        6·
        2 years ago

        I like that we see both up and down. I think that’s a good feature to be able to see all that. Much better than just the overall total.

    • CoinOperatedBoi@lemmy.ml
      21·
      2 years ago

      Yeah downvotes were being widely used as a form of harassment against trans users there. Within the first week there were voting bots being spun up by spammers and people looking to otherwise disrupt the site’s launch. It wasn’t long before ever single thing posted by a known trans user and everything posted in the trans comm was downvoted like 4 times immediately after it was posted.

    • Star Wars Enjoyer OPA
      251·
      2 years ago

      the problem with not having downvotes is when people don’t have the energy to voice their displeasure with something, they’re entirely robbed of their voice. The majority of users on any given platform would much rather just downvote something and move on, and it’s important that they have the ability to do so. Because if someone posts some dumb shit but no one’s got the energy to dispute them, the poster is never forced to realize that they said something stupid.

      Removing downvotes could be argued as being ableist, in this regard. Some people just don’t have the mental energy to type out paragraphs to explain why something hurts them or is wrong. Some people simply can’t type, or use a voice to text. These users deserve a voice, no matter how small.

      • darkcalling
        9·
        2 years ago

        This is very much why I’m in favor of downvotes.

        Go look at a place like hexbear and you’ll see why downvotes are important. People can post the most ridiculous liberal and imperialist or deviationist nonsense crap there and because there are no downvotes at most people use the inline image-memes at them and move on but that doesn’t hide their text or its position in the thread and in fact engagement of that kind often makes it look more important and stand out and if they’re engaging in liberalism or counterrevolutionary behavior that has wide support (among lurkers, trolls, etc) they could be upvoted to the top of a thread while actual effort replies are scattered among several comments none of which may get as many upvotes.

        It allows a community to police itself, to silence problematic behavior without mods, to mark someone’s comment or post as bad without having to explain why. This is helpful to both seasoned comrades and newcomers who might be misled by something that on a site without downvotes (and full of people too tired to argue with every potential troll) has 9 upvotes but on a downvote enabled site would have 9 upvotes and 40 downvotes and thus be -31.

        Downvotes are the answer to bad faith gish galloping debaters, trolls, and operatives seeking to disrupt.

        That being said they can be used by those same groups which is why I think having a system that analyzes the signal to noise of downvote/upvotes, looks for those who consistently downvote things the rest of the community upvotes and and starts weighting their downvotes to only count every fifth time or something like that. But it’s a minor issue as long as you have good moderation and an active community.

        Edit: You could remove downvotes and prevent the infiltration of liberalism and deviation by having very vicious moderation and bannings tossed out for so much as glancing at others wrong too many times BUT downvotes are better because they’re soft moderation.

        They don’t remove someone with one bad take (or a few) permanently from a community but allow people to grow while showing that they’re clearly at odds with the community which may cause a reassessment of their incorrect ideas (peer pressure from the community writ large versus a faceless moderator who is easily dismissed as a fed, an uneducated person, a singular person with an agenda, etc). You still need bannings but it’s kind of a soft moderation system that nudges posters rather than going straight to banning and it gives legitimacy to the moderators. If someone has been downvoted repeatedly and is then banned, well the community clearly stands behind the mods in that they’ve repeatedly shown this person is posting bad.

        If the mods just go around banning people for their interpretation of behavior that would normally be resolved via downvoting then you get drama, claims of persecution, of moderator misconduct, of witch hunts, threats that the punished represent some portion of the community and must be given voice to air their grievances (something which cannot be debunked as without downvotes you can’t know how much of the community agrees vs disagrees). Which can also spiral into actual moderator abuse and excess because of the latitude granted and the perceived mandate to keep spaces clean of any whiff of liberalism, reaction, or ultra-ism which would normally be kept in check with downvotes.

        So, are downvotes perfect? No. But I think they’re better than the alternative of not having them.

    • panic
      7·
      2 years ago

      You see other negative aspects of downvoting in the way lazy raiders from other instances will downvote bomb people they have individual issues with or whole threads.

      I’ve noticed trans positive posts and anti-racist post getting downvoted. You’re the voting system is letting bigots hide

      • darkcalling
        61·
        2 years ago

        On hexbear people rarely offer substantive rebuttals to bad points. They use inline image memes/gifs and move on. Which doesn’t actually debunk the point and might leave some lurker thinking “huh they have a good point, people don’t like it but they won’t say why so they must have no rebuttals”. And that doesn’t create a good culture. That’s a discord culture of memeing and that becomes expected. It doesn’t show dissent, it distorts views. Because you have like 8 reactionaries, liberals, ultras, or whatever upvoting their point, then a bunch of people, maybe 6 posting reaction memes in the comments that disagree but that 8 number next to it looks a lot more approving and impactful than those reaction comments downthread.

        Really bad illustration for your point but an excellent one for mine which is while people claim and hope this will happen. Guess what? The people who have the knowledge and time to do replies get burned out. There are more bad faith people out there with money, time, etc than there are communists who have the time to bat down every single new reincarnation of propaganda, a lie, ultra behavior, etc.

        This is why a lot of new learner spaces are heavily moderated. Because bad faith actors come in, use certain tactics and aim to burden, overwhelm, and burn out the regular users so they don’t have a chance to interact with genuine good faith new learners.

  • panic
    48·
    2 years ago

    I’m in favour of removing downvotes

    • 201dberg
      3·
      2 years ago

      I think the way it’s done here is a good intermediate between no downvotes vs what most places do with the total score only. I like that we can see the number of up and down votes. I like to be able to see the number of ppl that disagree with me or that I’ve pissed off. lol

      But Hexbear removed downvotes and it’s not to bad over there. It does push ppl to give counter points and actually communicate more… although I feel like it also causes some disagreements to become overheated and someone always ends up banned. Pros and cons to it.

      • panic
        11·
        2 years ago

        I’ve seen trans positive posts getting downvoted time and time again on almost every platform that uses them. It drives me crazy that people ignore how this is used on the internet when you’re part of a minority.