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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Well said
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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
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 😇
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Not a grad user, but replying to say I would love to try out an instance which implements this.
You can already effectively do this by
- Going into your settings and hiding vote scores.
- Change default sorting to New
Yes, thank you, I am aware of those two fewtures and have used them before. However that only changes the feel of the site for me and not for other users. It would not change the behaviour, culture or feel of the instance itself.
I’m imagining that an instance without visible upvotes would have a different culture to that of both grad and bear, possibly one that I may find more valuable and enjoyable.
How that would be I cannot say for sure. Plus I know the solution here is ‘DIY’ so I’m just sharing my thoughts.
For what it’s worth, the Hiding Vote Scores toggle has a bit of a bug on mobile, at least, if I long press the upvote button, I can view the balloon showing the upvotes, downvotes and aggregate score. Unsure if the corresponding behaviour on PC does the same (mouse hover?).
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)?
