Getting rid of downvotes the way Hexbear did
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It is worth discussing whether it is a worthwhile feature for Lemmy to allow making a community local-only or something like that.
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:
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
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.
As a hb user for a long time now I'll just add my own experience some of you may not realize.
Even though downvotes are removed it is still quite easy to see at a glance what the majority opinion is just by looking at the vote count. If you see for example
Comment A: +15
Comment B: +13
Comment C(reply to b): +2
I personaly think it is pretty damn obvious still specialy if C is a "hot take" and even more so if made at the same/close time. You'll get used to it and requires more diligence from the reader, honestly voting systems are not even close to perfect. You'll still see the same takes getting high upvotes and bad takes getting low upvotes.
Downvotes were maybe useful on a large site like reddit where you may wonder between completely different communities and may not know whats the difference between good/bad content but in a centralized community you should learn that difference eventualy therefore a lot of the arguments I'm seeing here(they were made exactly like this back then for us too) do not actualy take into account the simple dynamic; outsiders/wreckers/libs will easily downvote stuff they disagree, but they'll never upvote. Therefore it eventually becomes just as easy to see these differences. Even though downvotes were removed, the dynamic "moderation" aspect still remains.
Just my 2c have fun.
This is very interesting insight.
I think we should show a pop-up when hovering over the "score" that shows which instances the votes came from; it should be doable since each vote is stored with a user ID
or just don't show downvotes from other instances 😇
Both solutions are inadequate. The best solution is to enable the ability to display who does the upvotes and who does the downvotes. This way we can easily tell who are the comrades (anyone who upvotes me) and who the libs/chuds are (anyone who downvotes me), no need to worry about all the problems about whether we need to have a downvote button or not.
How is voting to be done? Hopefully not upvotes/downvotes in this post because they are not lemmygrad only.
Could we restrict down votes to lemmygrad comrades, so we could set strong signals incorrectness?
I strongly disagree removing downvotes. Maybe remove federated downvotes. But we still should be able to signal accordingly that someone is wrong without strongly engaging with them.
Removing downvotes feels like a safe playground, fit for liberals. I'd prefer candid discussion and dunking, as lemmygrad comrades have shown over and over that we're able to.
Agreed with this.
I think both upvotes and downvotes should be removed. I do not like the idea of there being "scores" for posts. It makes posting feel needlessly competitive.
I think it's an improvement over the old BBS style "last replied to at the top" and also naturally integrates the replies that are "broad agreement but nothing to add" (e.g. "this") for measuring a particular thread's engagement.
I strongly agree with this. A problem might be the way sorting works, a comment at the top would have the implicit perception of a higher score, even with hidden scores.
remove downvotes, remove upvotes, remove images and make the site look a usenet BBS from 1989 and I'm not joking
So Metafilter plus communities (although they did add upvoting eventually)?
I largely ignore voting scores, but occasionally use down votes when I think someone has a bad take. A comment is better,but sometimes it's not worth the effort to comment about a disagreement. Discourse does not seem to be missing or replaced by down votes.
The idea of removing voting scores altogether is more attractive to me than removing down votes and I think others have made good points for how this functionality can help with moderation and needlessly clogging up threads with emotes that function the same as a downvote. Ultimately, even downvoting in mass has little to no impact on Lemmy.
That said, if there are arguments for how removing the downvote button would improve things, I'm open to listening to them as well as running a trial without down votes for a month or so. In the later case, it would be nice to have some metrics that we could track and follow up with a poll.
Please take this in the spirit of brainstorming: Does Lemmy currently have functionality for a attenuating weight of downvotes from certain specific federated instances? Edit: The weight in terms of comment sortition, I mean.
It does not have that functionality.
Many may get it, but to spell it out: Some instances may become (or already are) havens for lib vote brigading. It might ease mod toil if attacks from those instances could be automatically attenuated in this way.
It worked well for us. Any libs are ruthlessly set up on by hexbears with dunks and shitting pig emojis rather than just down voting.
do it. getting rid of downbears made hexbear way more fun imo. it also allows us to hit especially bad takes with the
emoji, which never stops being funnyDeath to America
"I disagree" buttons make the platform better
I'd be ok removing downvoting and just remove shit posts more aggressively instead. If something's getting heavily downvoted chances are it was just trolling to begin with.
My kneejerk reaction is to worry about how much moderation labor can scale or be sustained over the long haul. I already can’t believe how much effort you mods are putting in.
Yeah, we would definitely need to do more modding. One option could be to nominate more mods from the community though.
Fully agree. Most of these aren't even real people, they're bots. Why else would we suddenly see 30+ downvotes all at once on some posts with little activity beforehand and afterwards? The enemy is actively manipulating.
Maybe it could be kept track of, and past some threshold downvotes could be disabled for like, idk, a week? Something like that could allow for experimenting and ease folks into it.
A week gives plenty of time to liberals to bregade posts though. Getting rid of them once and for all is the best course of action.
Is it possible to disabled downvotes per-community? A mix of gradual rollouts, trial runs, and/or community feedback posts would probably work well. How you all do demcent is up to you of course, but this has worked well for Hexbear.
big fan of how hexbear does things. it protects trans people from silent stalkers that downvote all our posts. DO IT. LAUNCH THE ZIONISTS AND THE TRANSPHOBES INTO THE SUN
thanks for coming to my tedtalk
Removing the ability to downvote means we can no longer downvote transphobic content. Instead, it might have +10 upvotes since you disabled downvotes, and now you have to see it and be appalled by the lack of downvotes, and engage with it.
This is the goal of big tech in removing downvotes: to platform reactionary content, make it ambiguous whether or not its popular, then force engagement through ragebait. Not anything we want to replicate here.
This is a massive problem on twitter and youtube especially, platforming the worst content, making it seem popular (and often driving it to the top), and making you stress and think about how to respond, because you have no ability to quickly downvote it. Probably ruins untold numbers of people's psychological well-being.
Removing the ability to downvote means we can no longer downvote transphobic content. Instead, it might have +10 upvotes since you disabled downvotes, and now you have to see it and be appalled by the lack of downvotes, and engage with it.
Transphobic content should be removed and banned, not downvoted. And users from minority groups should have their concerns taken seriously, not banned.
This is the goal of big tech in removing downvotes: to platform reactionary content, make it ambiguous whether or not its popular, then force engagement through ragebait. Not anything we want to replicate here.
So you think hexbear is platforming reactionary content? After all, the stated reason of removing downvotes was to explicitly stop harassment of vulnerable users. Do you consider that to be a railroad to reactionary thought?
This is a massive problem on twitter and youtube especially, platforming the worst content, making it seem popular (and often driving it to the top), and making you stress and think about how to respond, because you have no ability to quickly downvote it. Probably ruins untold numbers of people’s psychological well-being.
The biggest problem with youtube is its algorithm and how little hateful content is removed, not whether or not you can downvote things.
Lemmygrad doesn't have the history of trans users being targeted with mass downvotes like Hexbear did. We've had the occasional mass downvote brigade targeting specific comms, but they seldom last more than a few days maxed.
Another reason I've heard brought up is that it will make libs show their ass instead of hide anonymously. This encouragement to post is a good fit for Hexbear's post from the hip culture, but not necessarily Lemmygrad's.
lets get rid of the funny engagement arrows, its not conductive to good discussion and anything that is worth a downvote is usually worth a ban
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
A lot of the points raised here were raised on Hexbear in its discussion about removing downvotes. It was somewhat controversial at the time, but pretty much everyone there now agrees it was the right call. Take that for what you will.