this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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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
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
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.
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
Have you ever seen how active our site is for its size? What you're getting is just the normal amount of organic engagement when you offer our most prolific posters the opportunity to dunk on the most braindead libs outside of reddit.
Why would there be a large proportion of lemmy.world comments when the thread is literally about hexbear? You don't expect hexbear users to have stronger opinions on that than lemmy.world users?
Imagine you've got 100,000 people in a room. Let's say they're split between people wearing blue shirts, green shirts, and red shirts. But it's not an even split. Half of the people in the room are wearing red shirts. Someone in a blue shirt steps up onto the stage and says, "Open discussion everyone: I think red shirts are assholes and we should kick them all out of the room."
What exactly do you expect to happen next?
That's not what the thread in question was. We were invited to join the discussion. If we had not been welcome to join the discussion, we would have stayed out of it.
Regarding the analogy:
it's not one but multiple connected rooms
the room with people in red shirts has suddenly decided to connect with the rooms with the less numerous blue and green shirts
it's not "someone" in a blue shirt, it's a significant number of people in blue shirts who think the red ones should simply return to their own room that they were perfectly happy with until now
https://lemm.ee/post/4543536
Where exactly do you see the invitation? I see "I am very interested to hear thoughts and responses from our own users."
go back to reddit. this is the fediverse, the entire point is that these are not, in fact, "separate" rooms. being connected is the default. that's why it requires a giant discussion to kick anyone out.
It was posted publicly to all federated communities and absolutely no indication was made that the majority of people to whom the post was sent were unwelcome to participate.
On Hexbear, we have a rule that we have to leave meta discussions of other instances alone if they want us to. All the admin had to say was, "lem.ee users only" and we would've stayed out. If you refuse to take such a simple measure to restrict discussion to your own community, you do not actually want to restrict discussion to your own community.
And the admin didn't. You can go ask him. He was not trying to keep hexbear users out or in any way offended by the fact that we participated in the discussion. Why are you (a member of neither instance) offended on his behalf?
Don't hate us because we post like gods gift to the internet.
You just cant match the raw power of our posting skills and that makes you feel weak and pathetic. As it should.