This missed the historical context for why downvotes were disabled on Hexbear in the first place. Moderators were trying to implement trans-friendly policies and features like pronouns, and reactionary weirdos kept downvoting the shit out of people who agreed with and wanted those features. Mods tried to ban based on upvotes and downvotes, but it didn’t work.

I think the assumption that any site’s general culture will be correct on an issue is a faulty one. Yeah, it’s going to be generally correct about international politics or Marxism or something everyone researched on the site probably (when it’s on Hexbear or Lemmygrad at least), but anyone who’s part of a smaller or more fucked over minority has to basically fight an uphill battle to even be listened to even with downvotes off. With downvotes on, someone asking for accommodations or sympathy in a radical or surprising way that other users haven’t seen before will just be shut down entirely. I think a good example of this is how I’ve seen people constantly make fun of others for stuff like not showering and, when people talk about how those with depression often do their best but can’t manage it and so making fun of someone for that can be hurtful, they were just ridiculed. If downvotes were enabled most complaints about ableism or more obscure forms of anti-queer oppression would be pushed to the fringes and ignored.

The main issue with downvotes are that they allow those with hegemonic beliefs to enforce them without considering why they hold those beliefs in the first place.

So ultimately, it’s a trade off between if you want to be open to more radical theory that people would have a knee-jerk reaction to and downvote, or be more closed to that theory but allow site members to enforce the popular opinion more strongly

So basically, the consensus here is that sometimes being responsible about shutting down bad ideas, is not explaining exactly how someone is wrong, but rather it means firmly exclaiming “Siddowwwn!! SIDDOWWWN!!” — Whereas I remember on Hexbear that there was more worry about how downvotes could disproportionately affect certain groups, and that this worry was a part of the decision to disable them. Hexbear’s emote spamming doesn’t necessarily prevent people from seeing what the community consensus is, like darkcalling suggests, because once one person has commented an emote, then everybody else can just upvote that. It is clunkier, yes, but it’s meant as a deterrent.

However, if I can be completely honest, I had been noticing for a while that on Hexbear there were people sometimes saying things that to me seemed really half-baked, or even like drunk-and-stoned “just say shit” comments, so I had honestly been questioning whether disabling downvotes did sometimes also have a detrimental effect on the Quality of Discourse. Not necessarily a super big impact, because you do notice that Bad comments get fewer upvotes and generally do get replies, even if they’re just something simple like “Are we sure about this?”, but it’s an impact nonetheless. There are after all eleven types of liberalism, several of which concern an attitude of not publicly coming forth with one’s criticisms, and it seems like a bit of a bad idea to assume that all self-proclaimed commies on the Internet have fully exorcised each of these eleven ghosts. It is very easy to think “I’ll let someone else handle this one” or “Well, a downbear seems a bit harsh for such a small issue, I have no ill will towards this person”.

Downvote-disabling definitely seemed like a good feature when I first came to Hexbear, because I’d had experiences previously of getting downvoted on Reddit and on my previous fediverse instances, which always left me thinking either “Huh? What? What’d I do wrong?” or “What’s-a matter you?” or “Ugh, these liberals are incapable of critical thought” — but in a sense I can see how it is a bit of a selfish, liberal perspective to not want to get “virtual glares” as if it’s others’ duty to educate me like I’m a little baby, or like my own ideas are always so important that they shouldn’t just be dismissed out of hand, rather than thinking about the health of the community as a whole.

I dunno, I guess downvotes enabled vs downvotes disabled is like the two emissaries of Java: equal in valor, at least until proven otherwise. Maybe the culture of Lemmygrad will make up for my previous issues with downvotes, but it’s still a change back to an old system which will require some readjustment, small as the difference actually is.

Well it means that people can call me stinky without explaining exactly how, which isn’t very nice