Just a suggestion, bad posts get reported or removed, good faith posts get responses.
The paranoria/low effort trolling its creating is having a detrimental effect on discussion, better to just remove the ability for low effort trolls to effect conversation.
sometimes people on hexbear reply with just the downbear emoji on a person’s comment and others upvote that reply, essentially acting as a makeshift downvote button for that comment. removing the downvote button but then letting this happen is gonna make the removal a bit redundant.