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.
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.
The good thing about upvoting is it makes the best content go to the top. I say get rid of downvotes entirely and hide upvotes. So they still function but don’t display a score
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.
Not a grad user, but replying to say I would love to try out an instance which implements this.
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)?
Agree 100%. I think stuff by libs should be removed and stuff my comrades should be replied to with comments. Downvotes add nothing
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.
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.
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.
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 does not have that functionality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 will mention @[email protected] 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.
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.
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 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.
Comments that don’t deserve responses should be removed
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.
Consider that that’s easily said when one isn’t on the hook for doing the moderation labor.
