you'll see a pig shitting on his own balls

I tend to prefer it as an approach. Hexbear is a left unity site, it doesn't have a predominant ideology, so down votes as a way to discipline ideology don't work nor function properly. Downvotes are most useful on sites with ideological conformit, like Lemmygrad.ml.

that was done to protect brands. hexbear did it to protect trans people, and it creates a culture of articulating your disagreement rather than silently downvoting and moving on

They ended up removing the downvotes because the mods there spent all their time inspecting who left the downvotes and it resulted in several extremely embarrassing meltdowns. You can imagine how ludicrous this was, as people don't always downvote stuff they have some vehement ideological disagreement with. They might just not like spam, or feel like a bit of an asshole towards a person (I mean, nobody ever followed reddiquette anyways, so that's fine).

While I agree with removing downvotes in principle, as I almost never vote on anything in anticipation of when certain people finally add "RSS feeds of what you have upvoted, saved, & downvoted" as a feature, the principle being explained here by others is not the real explanation.

This might sound harmless but the site mods (I get it, it's funny to go full censorship on people who sideye your friends) have actually spent several years claiming that democratic party Zionists are leftists, & painting anyone who disagrees with them as a chud. They still maintain that burning the Israeli flag is vaguely antisemitic (which is itself antisemitic, as Israel is not intrinsically tied to the fate of all practicing Jews, that's ethnonationalism dressed up with woke.) Just be normal and hang out.