this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Writing
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This is fine while we're still small, and the number of intentional bad actors is limited. If our user sign-up vibe check filter ever fails, though, and we get inundated with a thousand alt-right trolls, the inability to downvote is going to majorly suck. Having to sit down and compose a well-worded, sourced comment every time they brain-dump a load of reality-distorting rubbish onto my feed is a huge time- and energy-sink, which is exactly what they're going for. It takes them 3 minutes to type some pile of complete nonsense, and it takes me half an hour or more to debunk it. By the time I'm finished with my "this is why you're wrong" comment, they've gone on to copy/paste their own fuckery 30 different times over 10 different comment threads and 6 different Lemmy posts.
Eventually, nobody will have the energy for these chuds any longer, and their screeds will stay up unopposed or only marginally opposed, which is their intended goal.
Downvotes make it simple, quick, and easy to fight this bullshit-shotgun tactic, because clicking one time is faster than the fastest-typing sealion. While they outpace my ability to sit and debunk their "arguments", each one of their posts can accumulate double-digit downvotes before they even finish posting it on the next thread, hiding them from everyone who's not sorting the comment section by "dumbfuckery".
We'll see how it goes, though. I tend to be cynical and doomy, and maybe the things I worry about will never happen, or will shape up differently than I predict. But the fact that none of the "Yay, no downvotes!" people ever address this concern is something that reduces my level of confidence in the scheme.
if they're spewing hate them we'd report them, not downvote
What if they're "just asking questions"? What if they're "just reporting facts"? Are fake statistics, biased sources, and polite misinformation (they could just be mistaken!) actionable? What if they're walking right up to the line of civility and putting one big toe on it? These are all things they're really good at doing.
Basically, no downvotes means either a lot more work for the other users and/or a whole lot more work for the moderators. Every single post has to be carefully examined, compared against the existing rules, potential policy loopholes have to be considered, intentions have to be assumed or guessed at, and by the time all that's done for one post, there are 30 more from the same user on the same theme (but now they're not copy/pasted, they're just different enough to require a whole 'nother full review for each and every one).
I've been there, as both a user and a moderator, and I've tried to do that out of a sense of fairness and balance, but it's totally impossible to keep up with the firehose of nonsense.
fair enough