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.
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 -
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'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.
I completely agree every instance should be tailored to the needs of their individual community.
It was not my intention to weigh in on the pros vs. cons of downvotes, I checked out the thread to see what others thought of a 'key Hexbear feature'; the main reason I made the post was to push back against what I felt was an unfair criticism of Hexbear's content.
Kinda got a little meta as I was forming it in my mind and I ran with it.