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.
Removing the ability to downvote means we can no longer downvote transphobic content. Instead, it might have +10 upvotes since you disabled downvotes, and now you have to see it and be appalled by the lack of downvotes, and engage with it.
This is the goal of big tech in removing downvotes: to platform reactionary content, make it ambiguous whether or not its popular, then force engagement through ragebait. Not anything we want to replicate here.
This is a massive problem on twitter and youtube especially, platforming the worst content, making it seem popular (and often driving it to the top), and making you stress and think about how to respond, because you have no ability to quickly downvote it. Probably ruins untold numbers of people’s psychological well-being.
Transphobic content should be removed and banned, not downvoted. And users from minority groups should have their concerns taken seriously, not banned.
So you think hexbear is platforming reactionary content? After all, the stated reason of removing downvotes was to explicitly stop harassment of vulnerable users. Do you consider that to be a railroad to reactionary thought?
The biggest problem with youtube is its algorithm and how little hateful content is removed, not whether or not you can downvote things.
We do remove and ban transphobic content. Downvotes helps us see that quicker too, in addition to reports that people can make, but often don’t have the energy to bc of burnout.
Of course not, but since they removed downvotes is very possible for someone to make troll accounts, upvote transphobic content, and force people to see that it has a positive score. Not a fun experience, and it shows that upvote without elaboration can be as psychologically harmful and harassing as downvote without elaboration. The solution that lemmy has is that you can disable displaying all vote scores in your user settings.
Also, I’m not, and I hope no one else would, go over to hexbear and demand they make changes, and start fights with everyone. We have our own site rules, and one of them is to be respectful to other comrades here. If you can’t disagree without being respectful, we won’t hesitate to issue temp bans.
I sat here pondering on how to write this to you, but I think I’m talking to a brick wall. It should be noted that I have extensive history in dealing with trans spaces in social media and I think hexbear is the only place that has gotten it right, though there is still room for improvement (re: better mod tools and automation). I’m on the mod team for /c/traa, and I also run an irl LGBT org almost singlehandedly (I work with the trans community in our area and redirect them to resources). I recently helped a woman IRL that had her parents spiral into a reactionary frenzy due to social media and the result was predictable. Any reduction in the harassment campaign against us is of critical importance, and I am emphatically demanding that you consider what I have said here, as it is very likely that I simply just know more than you.
I also gotta tell you, in the kindest way possible, you need to shut the fuck up about civility when talking to someone from any minority group. It makes you look like a liberal and it is a bad look.