So the optimal way to game the algorithm is: have a socialist post, but with liberal comments. Then have hexbears dunk on the liberal comments in the socialist post to push the post further. But invisible liberal commenters (to us) will also increase engagement with their comments, these invisible liberals can be made by banning people or defederation.

By banning liberal posters, but not necessarily all commenters, we end up with more socialist posts on the main feed. Commenting in general also just increases the likelihood it hits the top of the page and we like commenting.

So far we have banned most of the big liberal posters, so this is causing socialist content to go higher up in the feed because we are indirectly flooding hexbears into a limited number of socialist threads, causing those few socialist threads to stay up for days at a time as activity continues to increase, thus increasing the amount and staying power of socialist content on lemmy in general