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.
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.
To hear incorrect views without rebutting them is the sixth type of liberalism
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 😅