Ok but as someone who used to mod large trans subreddits that’s less what their mo was compared to brigading with posts and comments and sending threatening messages.
Obviously that’s a much bigger problem and I don’t doubt it happened a ton. From the user standpoint of someone trying to just use the community, it’s incredibly disheartening (especially if you have no IRL community to reach out to) to post, have a post go to 0 or negatives within minutes, and then ignored. When I still used reddit I would frequently see posts from people asking why everything was downvoted so quickly, which probably just encouraged the people who were doing it.
lemmynsfw has implemented (or intends to) an interesting compromise, in that you can only downvote posts on that instance’s communities that you’re already subscribed to. Ideally, this means that downvotes are for the quality of the individual post, rather than as a reaction to the type of content.
I think they mean you can’t see the results. So you can downvote a post but if you look at a post it doesn’t show you how many downvoted. It only shows you how many upvoted. It makes it impossible to tell if a subject is controversial.
It still affects engagement statistics/algorithmic suggestions, and video posters can still see them to help gauge what content is liked or not. It’s just hidden from viewers.
Beehaw does the same. I’m not sure if that’s been the case in our instance. I don’t inherently disagree, but I’m not 100% sold either.
If there’s a clearly bad/misinformed/rude take, they simply don’t get voted on. They rarely have more than the single 1 vote of their terrible opinion/sharing.
It’s common to see +10 to +30 on a positive comment, with the comment it’s responding to at 1.
I don’t disagree that it could be a bad thing, but I think it’s about the community and its practice surrounding it as well. So far in my experience on the instance I participate in I’ve seen it be effective.
Also I’m not sure if this is a thing on Lemmy but on reddit there were downvote farmers. Downvoting could also actually encourage people to perform these terrible comments to accumulate as many downvotes as they can. Downvoting disabled removed this problem in its entirety. Reddit has this issue long before some of its other problems and it has only grown since, up til I left. I don’t know what the state of it is now, and I’m not sure how big of an issue it even is on Lemmy. It comes down to finding the line between what is preferable.
All in all, I think there are good and bad things about not having a downvote. I do think downvote disabled helps some aspects (engagement, active/trending posts) but it could also negatively influence federated content (spam, bad actors). I don’t think a comment being at -30 is any more telling than the same comment at 1 when it’s surrounded by +30 upvoted comments. However, if someone actively sought out getting downvoted, that can no longer exist.
IMO trading having bad comments be visibly negative in order to prevent the downvote farmers is a reasonable exchange
Hexbear.net (spun off from r/chapotraphouse, banned on Reddit in 2019 for fascist propaganda), has downvotes disabled on their entire instance, so that's one. Please note that though they claim to be "leftist," their users' primary focus is spreading right wing propaganda via strawman and red herring tactics, usually in swarms.
There's a megathread on their front page right now dedicated to Joseph Stalin. Now, they'll argue all day over semantics and adamantly state that Stalin was merely a misunderstood communist, but functionally there's no difference between how he ran Russia compared to the shit going on in Germany and Italy at the time. The guy was a fascist dictator who murdered millions of people, including the members of the opposition he ordered to be executed. Not to mention the forced labor camps (Gulag), the censorship, government control of all media, state-authorized violence and murder...these are the things their hero did. They are in no way indicative of left wing tenets, nor are they merely anti-capitalist in nature. That shit goes way beyond hating capitalism...that is fuckin' fascism.
Can you point me at the right wing propaganda on hexbear? Someone elsewhere in this thread said blahaj has downvotes disabled so that might be two.
It’s interesting to me that hexbear disabled downvotes because of downvoting campaigns against lgbt users, cultivated a culture of replying instead, federated with blahaj, broke with blahaj and now blahaj ostensibly removed downvotes.
They were actually banned from reddit for posting “John Brown was right” memes implying that the radical abolitionist was correct to kill slaveowners. They can be excessive and annoying but they’re certainly not fascists.
It’s also something I’ve pointed out in the past that netted me bans on other instances (not just the community but the whole instance)
My instance has down votes disabled as well and it’s something that has made me want to switch instances at times. Not to mention the admin really wanting to federate with Hexbear which is absolutely not popular with the users on the instance.
Oh wow, the blahaj admin wants to federate with them? That is unfortunate and more than a little disappointing. I'm sorry to hear that, I hope they figure it out soon and decide not to federate, because they'd just be exposing their users to fascist recruitment propaganda that is specifically tailored to the LBGTQ+ community. JFC, that would be awful.
The Hexbears' support for the queer community, as I'm sure you're aware (I'm saying this to promote general awareness), is superficial at best and in reality is a major part of their recruitment machine. They operate just like extreme right wing orgs: they target a specific disenfranchised group with the claim that they hear them, support them, and will fight for their rights, but in practice they take advantage of their already-present anger by funneling it towards a specific political target...in this case, the "liberal western world." The Hexbear ethos tells them that western values are the reason why they are being oppressed, and in the process they (somewhat ironically) become radicalized instruments of hate.
It's fucked up and really sad, and it's hard to get through to people just how dangerous this group is. A common defense is that the Hexbears are harmless because they think the Hexbear trolling approach is funny and that Hexbears don't come right out and say they are pro-Russia or deny genocide is happening in the world... it can be real difficult to get people to think critically and see past the manipulation tactics. But it's there, plain as day, it is a hate group.
But I digress. People need to know that these are not innocent good people. I will continue to speak out against these fascists, and I hope you do the same.
Removing downvoting feels intuitively wrong to me (eg, I believe that dissent is a really important part of a healthy democracy). If all those mega-corp platforms are removing downvoting, then I’m pretty confident my intuition on this matter is correct
The voting will stay but your homepage will be a for you page that selects posts based on your usage data and whatever is trending instead of the votes, in an attempt to bring engagement to a maximum. Just like what’s been happening to Instagram for years.
And it happened right when it became apparent that we were living in the Disinformation Age and every bit of power to flag bullshit content became that much more important.
Add comment