And calling it “quality control”, lmao

To say /subtle/ is to overlook the expressed transparency of mod votes being distinguished from user votes. Anything you understood to undermine transparency is a misunderstanding. Transparency is important. None of the mechanisms mentioned are necessarily opaque if competently designed.

A brainstorm is not meant as a deeply detailed specification. You have to be able to imagine how transparency can be built into the designs.

To say “petty ego tripping” is to misunderstand the purpose of voting. Voting is a means to an ends, not the ends. I doubt anyone gives a shit what the total is (except of course ego trippers). Voting has a utilitarian purpose: to influence a quality score that sinks poor quality content and/or folds it, while raising high quality posts to the top. To have contempt for accurate scoring is to have contempt for quality control and curation.

To worry about voting losing its role of displaying an integer discrete vote count is actually to promote ego tripping. Using the votes for utilitarian purpose diminishes the use case as an ego tripper’s status symbol. So if you oppose ego tripping, you’re actually on the wrong side of this.

Votes could in fact remain as integers, 1 per vote, if you want to preserve the ego tripping function. While the quality score could be a separate number with a composition and calculation that need not be hidden from view.

(update) Consider how SpamAssassin works. It computes a score then it also gives detail on how the score was calculated:

X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Score: 7.2
X-Spam-Level: ******
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=7.2 required=5.0 tests=HTML_MESSAGE,
 RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE,SPF_HELO_NONE,SPF_NONE,URIBL_BLOCKED
    autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4

Rough example but a post quality score could be more or less similarly refined using smarter criteria than just equal weighted votes per account, particularly if people get multiple categories to vote on.

This comment is literally a trebuchet

Folding is not an obligation, so no time is wasted.

There is already some obligation for mods to decide whether each comment should be removed or not (as content can be illegal). But luckily there are mechanisms in place so mods do not have to read every comment. If you are worried that users would use the /alert/ mechanism to ask a mod to fold something, that’s already a risk and a problem. Adding the fold capability does not add to that burden.

No downvotes on hexbear. So no, it’s not the status quo here.

I said “status quo with Lemmy”, thus talking about the software, not the configuration. Note this is a cross-post. The original post was on Sopuli.

The software is designed to use the down votes to arrange the better quality content on top of the thread (to some extent¹). Of course if you disable the functionality on an instance then that particular instance does not use it, which is orthogonal to a discussion of how to improve the software. It would be bad quality engineering to design the software for a specific configuration of a particular instance.

¹ though not entirely because age is a factor AFAICT.

You’re getting pushback because we don’t put a lot of value in civility here and the best way to disagree or criticize someone is to post about it.

You can’t disagree when the post is censored. What do you reply to? I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned an alternative way to discourage a moderator from abusing their power to remove msgs they don’t agree with, which is the most rampant problem with moderation in the threadiverse (not just talking about hexbear but wherever Lemmy runs). The hexbear status quo encourages the abuses of power they think they are discouraging by having blunt tools. Which is not to say I’ve seen any such abuses of power on hexbear… not visited it much.

I have many accounts. No issues on db0 as far as I recall.

I’ve seen removals without rationale. The software allows it and mods tend to only give a reason in the most justifiable cases (spam). I’ve also seen robotic removals, where nothing appears in the modlog. These are entirely untraceable. It happens when a removal is systemwide and not by a local moderator.

Of course these features can be designed to spec. A msg folding action could (and should) force a rationale, which would then be more transparent than removals (which users have to go to the modlog for – only to potentially find nothing). Burying rationale in the modlog is not good for accountability because that’s less visited than the thread, which is where the folding rationale would appear.

And worse, removals are unnoticeable to the author. Authors see their own removed comments just fine. The status quo is very sneaky. I’ve discovered my comments were quietly removed /months/ after the removal, incidentally, because of the subtle way they are implemented. In one case it was because I was searching for my own comment using a different account than what I authored it with, and that was the only reason I could then realize it was removed. If you generally want to know if you have been censored, you need to periodically search for your own posts in the sitewide modlog. It does not get any more subtle than that.