this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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I don't know why you are shocked and horrified when people engage with something on their own front page?
That's how federation works, is it not?
It's not brigading, it's literally right there at the top of the front page, so of course people will comment on it.
It certainly wouldn't be brigading if the ratio of hexbear comments was proportional to its size. But I haven't seen many lemmy.world comments there, for example, and they saw the thread in their feeds just as much as you did.
Federation works by connecting various instances with different goals and different userbases. Those instances need a space to discuss those goals among themselves, where the admins can communicate with the users, etc. Some external engagement is to be expected, but one specific instance creating 3x more comments than all the others taken together (including the instance whose policy is supposed to be discussed) should, uh, raise an eyebrow.
Honestly it sounds about right. Prior to federation our news megathreads occasionally broke 1k comments over a week, and that's only a small subset of the userbase. Hexbear users have cultivated a culture that encourages being more online, and we were already extremely online. No downvotes, for instance, means that if you disagree with someone you have to comment, and we obviously disagree with the political opinions held by the majority of people so there's quite a bit there. Also worth noting that if an admin/mod expressly calls for us not to comment on a post, as was the case on the second defederation discussion post on blahaj, we won't.
I'm surprised at how reasonable and self reflective you are. Breaking the instances stereotype a tad
But, you bring up a point that I've always wondered about. Why would an instance not have downvotes? If I hosted an instance I'd prefer to not implement upvotes rather than ever getting rid of downvotes, considering they are basically required to filter out the bad faith content without engaging with it.
Well there's where the hexbear magic happens. If we see bad faith content it's basically open seasons to very vocally inform the poster how bad faith their post is.
I could imagine that this often leads to harassment. Are there any measures in place to prevent that?
If by harassment you mean getting piled on for the bad faith take, then no there's nothing except the offenders self-crit to prevent that.
If by harassment you mean a user that posted a bad take getting followed and dragged in other threads, then yes. Mods take action to prevent that. Everyone has a right to disengage at HB
Fair enough
I believe the original reason was that there were people downvoting trans positive content, and this let people be transphobic anonymously. (Conversely, transphobic content can easily be removed by moderators.)
And let's be honest, despite what reddit people might say, people don't only downvote bad faith content, they use the downvote as a "disagree" button.
when approached in good faith, 90%+ of Hexbears will level with you
When NOT approached in good faith (90% of the time) we don't react as well
Early in the history of the site, some bigots were finding trans users and then downvoting all of their posts and comments. The admins confirmed this, and went through and banned the offending accounts, but they just made alts, so the permanent solution was to eliminate the downvotes. Our moderation is so strict that bad faith arguing is banned on sight.
Also we're not as scary as all the libs would have you think. We're just, again, extremely online, generally confrontational, and have political views outside the norm. All this adds together to make us abrasive when we have to explain something that's taken for granted on our instance for the 50th time.
Also we have more emojis than anyone can remember, some of which render as giant on every other instance. Spoilered is a picture of a cartoon pig pooping which I'm using as a demonstration because I know it's one of the giant ones, and also one other emoji as a treat
Thank you for the reply. It's very informative
That's what PPB is for
queerphobic people were downvoting people just because they were gay/trans/etc, so we took note of those people, banned them, and removed downvotes so it couldnt happen again
if you see bad faith or shitty content you just tell the poster they're a loser
like so:
edit: I'm not calling you a loser but the ppb usually functions as a downvote. You either argue with someone or just bully them with ppb until they leave the site or the mods ban them
Remember, emojis are bugged so that ppb is the size of the entire webpage for everyone but us