In Hexbear we don't have down votes, so you have to engage with someone to express disapproval

Complaing about downvotes? Straight to jail.

verifiably false

Can you provide a link to show that? I went looking but the cross-posts that I saw were in !Apple@lemmy.world and !Apple@lemmy.zip. Since both have "Apple" in the name, that does not seem entirely like spam to me - unless you mean the content is low quality?

Not just fediverse, I think any site that allows "downvotes" has this issue.

Personally, I don't see why the ability to downvote needs to exist. If someone is trolling, ignore it or report it. A troll post with a score of 1 and no comments is better than one with a score of -100 and no comments. The downvotes probably encourages the troll. They know they've upset a bunch of people. All their posts getting no interaction will bore them.

On the other hand, downvotes existing leads to things being hated on for no reason. Someone on asklemmy asks what your favourite pizza topping is and the top comment is pepperoni with a score of 100 and bottom is sardines with a score of -50. You see that and think nobody likes sardines. But what if taking away downvotes changes the scores to 100 pepperoni and 12 sardines. Now sardines isn't looking so bad even though the number of people who like it hasn't changed. What does the downvoting add? It just makes the people who like sardines feel bad. They might end up not contributing in the future and then every answer to asklemmy ends up being identical.

Sadly... yes.

Some people feel like (I would say "think" but that seems not entirely accurate:-P) their preferences are the only ones that should matter, and that their right to "speak" should triumph over ("trump"?) your right to not have to listen. Entirely without the slightest hint of awareness as to the irony that they are supporting the very right-wing fascist ideologies that they claim to be against!! (I have taken to calling these the "Alt-Left", since they act identically to the USA "Alt-Right" that uses "alternative facts" in lieu of real ones as the basis for their belief structures). e.g. if they do not like a certain book then it is not sufficient for them to simply never read it - instead, everyone else must be denied the opportunity to access it as well, regardless of the circumstances you may find yourself in (being required to read it as part of a college course, seeking a well-balanced viewpoint by examining all sides of an issue, even highly negative ones?).

See also the phenomenon of "Eternal September". When people who act like children - of whatever physical age - flood the room, it becomes impossible for adults to have any kind of rational conversation. Put another way: respect is not something to be expected on the internet. When they go low... well, you have no choice but to take it and like it! Or you can leave.

No seriously: if you can move to a PieFed community, that would provide the only realistic solution I can think of to that problem that you are describing. Lemmy provides none (well, there is one but it is enormously extreme: it would involve making a community visible only to people on the same instance as wherever it is located, blocking out the entire rest of the Fediverse by default and forcing people to have accounts on every instance that chose to do this, thereby invalidating the entire concept of federation itself; although note the concept itself has merit for narrowly discussing certain instance-specific matters where outside opinions are neither appropriate nor welcomed, at the behest of the instance owner + admins) - and I doubt that it ever will, given how far behind Lemmy is in terms of features and how slowly those are added (it uses the very difficult to learn Rust coding language), plus the authoritarian biases present in the current set of its developers (who seem to prefer an admin dealing with such at the instance level rather than granting that power to anyone below the admin level). However, PieFed allows communities to receive votes only from people who have actually subscribed to that exact community - others can view the content, but only if they click the subscribe button can they interact with it to sway its visibility in that manner.

Yes, I am saying that PieFed might very well legitimately "save" the very concept of threaded social media, preventing it from being abandoned entirely by those of us who cannot stand the screaming cries of toddlers fucking literally fucking every fucking single fucking place that we fucking go. I would rather go read a book that I checked out from a library and never visit the Threadiverse again if I could not find such hope that no, somebody else's preferences do not get to dictate literally every tiny aspect of life that we all are allowed to live, which does not sound the tiniest bit like "freedom" to me.

Though I admit that I may be too overly sensitive right now to the absolute tidal wave of emotional vomiting that goes on across the Threadiverse (I live in America where the "will of the people" is leading to ah... uh... "big changes" as of late, so sadly I am losing hope that the masses always know what is "best" at all times - especially when not articulated in a well-reasoned rebuttal but merely delivered as a drive-by downvoting spree).

My favorite take on this.

No, that's a hyperbole to better explain the point. It's a common technique.

Anyway, Hitler is hard to top, but Apple with their support of literal bullying of people is not as nice as you might think.

For providing an example? Nice, classy.

You know why it's not a good comparison? Because I'm not going to report someone to instance admins for talking about the new Mario Kart.

Yes. It takes real restraint for me not to reflexively downvote news I don't like, or posts that makes me cringe but they're legitimate for the topic at hand. Also sometimes I downvote by accident without realizing.

Asking why things are downvoted or complaining about them are the two most surefire ways to receive plenty of them on the Threadiverse.

Upvotes or downvotes aren't worth anything, don't take it personally if you get downvoted. I've said unpopular stuff too and received downvotes. Once I wrote a raunchy joke and the votes on it went (1 -> 0-> 3 -> -5 -> 6 -> 20)

Sure, go for it. I literally do not care how people use single accounts to vote on any topic.

When they use multiple accounts, yeah that is clearly terrible because they are artificially inflating their votes.

It's funny because several mods on that instance do ban people for downvotes.

Do you take their overall up/down ratio into account?

I meant that's how I personally downvote. I don't subscribe to either Apple or Nintendo communities but I do see the cross posting spam in other communities and suggested it as a possible reason other people are downvoting.

No. I will note though that half of the people I banned for downvoting on the old lemm.ee instance didn't even have a comment history. Their accounts only existed to downvote. Others had been banned repeatedly by other communities for mass community downvoting. But even if they did, I would've still banned them. They were constantly downvoting new posts posted to the community and had no engagement with the community in comments or posts. How they may have behaved outside of it wouldn't have come into it for me.

Thank you for the explanation - upvoting btw (unless you cross-post your explanation where it does not belong, then I guess we should downvote it? :-P)

But why not simply block the community? An "Apple" news item in a community dedicated to "Apple" seems entirely relevant to me, and if I do not like "Apple" then I would want not to influence others to not see that one specific post but to see no similar posts in the future, which is accomplished by blocking the community rather than downvoting.

It would be like if I said that I hated your username b/c I do not like banjos - I don't btw, I love your username actually:-P - but really, who cares, as in why is my opinion relevant in that context? It is your username, you can name yourself whatever you like! I respect that.

Why not respect the preferences of others then, even if they decide to like "Apple"? (I am ignoring the comparison to Hitler b/c that is not merely hyperbole as in quantitatively different but of the same kind, and rather that one is a fully qualitative difference in kind)

You cannot change the entire world - certainly not merely by downvoting. All that you will accomplish by not respecting others' legitimate preferences will be to influence people's opinions of yourself.

Fun fact 90% of piefed users can't see your comment because the code comes with baked in blocking of hexbear and Lemmygrad lmao. If they can't handle down votes they could never handle getting dunked on by us.

The bots that I have heard of - I think it was called Santa or some such? - all require much more than a single downvote.

I dunno, if someone followed me around and downvoted half the stuff that I ever posted, I might make a bot to block them too. The key there is the severity of the "offense".