Insulting or attacking other users, even so much saying "fuck you", "fuck [this group of people]", "you're an idiot" or anything like that while debating IS against the rules of Lemmy.ml. This goes for every political view, you DO NOT get free passes no matter if you're leftist, rightist, communist, anarchist, liberal, etc. If you're confident of your position you should be able to debate in a civil manner without cursing someone else out. I understand that debates can get heated and frustrating, hell I've debated with a good bunch of users, but you can still express that without resorting to name calling or insults.
Check the modlog, we HAVE removed replies of this nature from every political view, and even if we don't say it every time, we DO keep track of both removals per user and general behaviour even if it doesn't get removed, and too many infractions WILL result in a ban.
That said, it is NOT against the rules to present countering facts or opinions, or to have political opinions in general. Don't report comments for "being pro communist" or "being pro China" unless they have broken an actual rule, namely the ones about being civil. Don't attack or insult people from Lemmygrad just because they're from Lemmygrad or they're arguing for Marxism-Leninism or supporting a country you don't. If they're presenting their points in a civil manner (which had been the case for almost everyone from Lemmygrad), you can either read it and respond in kind with your questions or counterpoints, or just move on. People coming over from other instances is not brigading if they're mostly being civil, that's the whole point of federation.
Things people disagree with getting down voted is also acceptable, it's not considered an attack on you if your comment has a negative score, and it doesn't even significantly affect the ranking because of the relatively low comment volumes currently on Lemmy. It's just imaginary internet points, relax.
Still can be sorted by most reactions too.
Then you'd have to assign numbers for the different reactions (otherwise how would you compare a heart to a poo emoji ) and we're back to where we started.
Poo and heart are both reactions, it can be sorted on first even if it's a +30 poo reactions, so people can see those comments and contribute on those comment threads when someone said something "stupid" or "bad". 3 poo + 6 hearts = 9 reactions. Comments with no reactions could mean, they don't say anything interesting at all. And I expect people reacting more with hearts and faces than a poo. Still, poo can be ignored as a counter, you can make the rules. (But I would make all reactions, even poo icon, to count as reaction)
So sorting by total reactions, regardless of if they're negative or not? That sounds like a way to bring some disliked things to the top.
So, if people want to do the same as the downvote right now, they will just need to not react and ignore the comment.
But then you've just taken away a method for people to express their dislike of something.
In my experience the only thing that removing downvotes changed in sorting was that it prevents users from suppressing the extremely shit posts. The sorting of the middle and high end of both comments and posts ends up almost identical.
The worst posts that would have received a tonne of downvotes are also almost always something that moderation would agree with removing entirely.
This tradeoff comes with the benefits of eliminating all the psychological issues that occur.
BUT, Lemmy can't go down this road imo as it would no longer be a reddit clone if it didn't have the downvote. My general opinion is that the downvote hurts conversation, creates circlejerks, hurts the way people see one another, and creates a mindset of writing a comment for the audience to "win" the interaction instead of writing a comment for the recipient. But the decisions about Lemmy should be about what's best for Lemmy's future as a tool though which is probably best to maintain the "reddit clone" selling point for the timebeing.
Any comment with reaction, for dislike or for a like reaction, is a debate where a lot of people are giving an opinion (reaction icon), so can be still on the top (but with a lot of poo).
If it's someone saying something stupid, he will see he got 0 reactions, no downvotes, so that can make him more alone/stupid and not looking for a voting war. Hoping this will unmotivated more the trolling people or voting wars.
I think people can still express their likes (reacting) and dislikes or indifference (not reacting) in a more healthy way.
My experience of internet discourse is that people will absolutely react with negative emojis to things that they consider 'stupid'. In some cases they are doing it to explicitly attempt to get a reaction out of the person who posted something, in other cases they simply want to point out that someone else is less than them, so that they can boost their own ego. I'm sure there are other use-cases, as humans are incredibly diverse.
Yeah, I was thinking emojis were more kind, and I don't even need a dislike button. I think it would be cool to use emoji reaction like with an X or with smile/laugh/xD/thinking and all those faces to quickly express my reaction. And dislike system could disappear...
I feel like facebook tried that. It's straight garbage on any controversial topic, at least how they implement it.
I don't have experience on that, I don't use any kind of social media (unless Lemmy and Mastodon), so I am probably pretty wrong if those systems neither work.