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.
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.
Socialism with Lemmygrad characteristics
Shitposting with Lemmygrad characteristics