Why don’t you make any of this shit democratic?

Just do a poll. Let the people decide.

i am upvoting everything in this thread at my own risk

1. Am I missing something obvious, or is the new upvote policy and the motivation for it not in any way explained in this post, or in the proposals post, or anywhere visible? I had to trawl through a bunch of posts to even find out what’s going on, from what I could see, the policy is explained and introduced in this comment, in a now locked thread, in a comm we’ve only had for like 3 weeks, that has a grand total, of, uh, 64 subscribers? Is this what we mean by transparency?

   Like, imagine if someone was, I dunno, hiking in the mountains for the past month, and they suddenly come back to some new moderation policies that will be entirely incomprehensible if you haven’t gone through 10000 comments worth of site lore. I mean, I actually did fucking follow the tanks drama, but I guess I miss like one fucking thread and now I might as well be completely out of the loop.

   For a site where we often tell people to touch grass, we sure as hell seem to expect everyone to be terminally online enough to keep up with our incessant stupidity if they want to have any chance of understanding why any action is being taken.

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2. I’m also throwing my hat into the ring as a habitual upvoter. Like, I don’t quite use upvotes as a “read” button, but I definitely don’t think too much about it. I upvote pretty much anyone who responds to one of my posts, unless they say something particularly disagreeable, I dunno, it just feels like… a courtesy somehow? Sometimes people will make some joke or obscure reference that goes completely over my head, and I’ll just sit there and ponder it for a minute… and upvote it anyway

   I dunno, it sounds stupid, but am I expected to treat every button press through a purely rational and analytical lens here? I’m not the site’s fucking UX designer, I’m just a monkey who clicks on things.

   I do use it as a “read” button in exorbitantly long threads (which, you know, we do get a fucking lot of), sometimes I’ll see that a response descends into , upvote it, scroll down to read some other, shorter subthreads, and then come back to finish reading the first one. Now, sometimes I’ll get tired and give up on reading the rest of the thread, and thus obviously not upvote the remaining comments in it, but this isn’t any sort of indication that I agreed with the first few responses and disagreed with the remaining ones, it’s just an indication of where I lost interest and gave up .

   I will also often upvote both sides of an argument too (as long as, again, one side isn’t being particularly disagreeable or impolite, and it should obviously be noted here that the line between “I mildly disagree with this but will still upvote it” and “I definitely won’t upvote this” is inherently vague, arbitrary, and vibes-based, I’m not a Sentiment Analysis algorithm, I’m a human being, with moods, and headaches, and various petty attitudes that I may or may not even be consciously aware of). There isn’t much rhyme or reason to this, the idea of “upvote = agreement/support” is just entirely disconnected from users’ behavior here.

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3. I pretty much stay out of struggle session discourse (aside from, occasionally, uh… lurking the threads and silently upvoting the side I agree with , but I guess I’ll have to stop doing that lest I end up backing the losing side in one of those ), this is maybe the first time I’m posting something serious in one, but this is genuinely starting to wear on me, it’s been what, 3 weeks of near-permanent revolution struggle? Every time I see a new pinned thread a sense of dread comes over me, how long is this going to fucking go on for? Can we just like, put a fucking moratorium on policy changes until things calm down a bit?

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4. I’ll link a couple of @Frank@hexbear.net’s comments from the past thread, since he’s way more eloquent on this than I’ll ever be, and I’m not sure how many people have even seen that thread (refer to pt. 1): on the inversion of mod/user roles and on discipline requiring trust.

   The last one in particular I will reiterate - discipline requires trust. At this stage, I am not sure if I can reasonably trust the moderation team: the mod statements from the previous drama, the embarrassing “self-crit” of one of those mods that followed, the fact that you made someone an admin with the reasoning of “well, they used to be an admin before!”, said person proceeded to completely mismanage the situation, start randomly handing out bans as some form of humor (?!), and just casually nope out of the mess they created and delete their entire presence here (I don’t care how many times you say “we disagree with her decisions”, the fact that this was allowed to happen in the first place is such a severe lapse in judgement that I don’t even know what to fucking say), the attempt at some kind of Tom Clancy scheme of manipulating other lemmy instances for some reason… given all of this, just this general caliber of decision-making competence on display here, how am I supposed to trust the moderation team to actually pore over individual users posts and upvotes and engage in some kind of internet psychoanalysis in order to discipline them fairly?

   I understand and sympathize that lemmy’s moderation tools are lacking, but that’s not the fault of the users. In fact, the general attitude of a lot of the userbase seems to be broadly critical of this site being a reddit offshoot! Although this is of course difficult to objectively judge (some of this is just ironic “phpBB forums… they don’t make 'em like they used to *sip*” posting, and many users don’t actively comment so their attitude is unknown), the broad popularity of the megathreads does seem to indicate the posters yearn for a different kind of site structure than the one we have. Now, at this stage it’s of course not really an option to just throw the site away and begin anew as something else, but still, being stuck with a shitty website that lacks functionality isn’t something the users should be punished over!

what was the point of the last few weeks?

Regardless of what you decide, I hope you can slow down on these larger changes soon. As someone who casually browses Hexbear, I don’t want to have to read through pages of patch notes just to know how to use the website.

Im not opposed to change but it feels a bit much in the last few weeks- thats all

Every announcement by the mods here prepended with some communist quote before posting the worst ideas for managing hobby politics webforum is some larp I don’t think I’ll ever without a solid brick of methamphetamine in my bloodstream.

Why are you doing this to yourself, i will never know. to watch though

Here is a proposal: don’t remove posts with some amount of comments in “wrong” comms, like nerds. Your labor in removing that thread is less than a comment, its goal is roughly meaningless, and its result is annoyance. But some mod can have some no-fun-allowed fun i guess.

Want to show how much you care about comm sorting? make the mod repost and reprint all comments in “correct” comm, so that people can continue conversation.

another proposal:

Make upbear only visible to the poster own comments, hide them and only use them for sorting reasons otherwise:

pros: those who like upbears will still see them.

cons: that would require work

I am a process/systems nerd due to my occupation and this just reeks of people trying to use the wrong tool for the job. I don’t think the lemmy software is what we need in order to accomplish what you folks are trying to do with the site. I think you’re going to have to create an increasingly complex system and implement labor-intensive processes for volunteers in order to make it work, but it will never work. You’ll find another problem and try to create policy to address that on top of the other policy.

We need different software, a different system, or we need to accept the limitations of the ones we have.

I now appreciate your overreach even less now as I’m being treated like shit for this by other users. If this shit doesn’t let up, I’m fucking leaving. I don’t need to put up with this because my brain can’t easily process walls of text.

EDIT: I’ve spoken more in depth with one of the folks and it seems to be a case of mistaken tone, but I definitely have caught flak for this already from another.

I’ve been examining my own upbear behavior and… there’s no consistency. It depends on my mood, what comm I’m in, what the discussion is about.

• Sometimes I’m upvoting everything to mark it as read, usually in the general mega and news mega

• Sometimes I’m not upvoting anything

• Sometimes I’m upvoting because I support an argument

• Sometimes I’m upvoting because I disagree but I think the argument is well stated.

• Sometimes I’m upvoting because I just want the writer to know someone read their post

• Sometimes I’m just idly, inconsistently upvoting without any thought at all, from muscle memory

• Sometimes I’m upvoting everything because “all posting is good posting”, a years old joke dating to the way the Subreddit strongly, strongly encouraged users to post no matter what. This was in contrast to the rest of reddit where there were very few posters compared to lurkers. This contributed to our famous and unstoppable “posting power” - A very strong community norm of posting, even if it was inane or meaningless, rather than passive viewing. That, in turn, defined the sub and later Hexbear as strongly encouraging active participation in contrast to many online communities where “low effort” posting was either formally or informally punished, and which in turn supressed many would-be speakers due to a chilling effect rising from fear of being judged or scorned for “bad posts”.

I have some screenshot, shit, let me find it.

Yeah, here, found it. So, Subreddit with EIGHT POINT SIX MILLION MEMBERS Vs. Small Communist Shitposting Lemmy, who would win? Upvoting everything contributed to the culture of user engagement that lead to Hexbear out-posting the entire rest of the Lemmyverse combined by a good margin. That’s a big part of why I found this incident to be so out of line. Arbitrary policing of something as contextless and ambiguous as upbears is directly against what created and sustains this place. As I’ve said before arbitrary moderation actions that directly run against community norms create a chilling effect and discourage user participation due to fear of running afoul of un-written rules or the whims of inconsistent moderators.

It’s late and I’m running low on steam, I’ll try to come back to this tomorrow.

deleted by creator

If y’all are going to start making upvotes public, then mod actions should also be public, not hidden behind anonymity or “modding accounts”. “Radical openness” in one direction isn’t radical openness, it’s just an excuse to abuse mod powers. If we have a right to know how people upvote, we have a right to see how you all are enforcing or aren’t enforcing things.

I just wish the private voting proposal got merged on the Lemmy repo

really ought to just go back to web forums instead of all these clones of popular social media websites. What is even the point of being a reddit? does anyone like reddit enough to care? I don’t.

The second is to increase transparency with regard to the site while not repeating the mistakes of previous attempts that were ultimately counterproductive, in part due to wreckers.

Previous attempts to increase site transparency and user participation were targeted by wreckers through increasing the intensity and frequency of struggle session drama.

Would be really interested to know what exactly these are referring to.
What previous attempts are being alluded to?
Who are the wreckers?

I thibk this site would be improved if they made me super epic cool god emperor admin which had all tbr powers and also gave me 400 dollars