Examples that come to mind are political communities, linus tech tips, diet communities, etc. There will be a group of people who will not make comments, posts, but will strictly downvote everything that is in the community.

This is a continuation of a discussion @Blaze@feddit.org and I started elsewhere, but it deserves it's own space for meta-moderation discussion.

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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

My personal view - its a net negative,

for the community itself. It is a chilling effect, discouraging people from posting. Yes the votes don't matter, but they are a social signal, and people (especially infrequent posters) can be hyper sensitive to that.

For Lemmy as a whole, I think its also a net negative, people only participating to rain on other peoples parade isn't driving engagement (see above), but it means their feed is filled with posts they don't like, reducing the quality and interaction of their experience.

Possible Solutions:

Ability to voluntarily unlist from the ALL feed for niche communities.
Moderation bot that looks at strictly negative interactions in a community and help those users "block" the community. i.e. someone who never posts comments, or ever finds anything positive in the community.

Thoughts @Blaze@feddit.org ?

Context - Right now I moderate two communities that are basically my personal journals, since they are so niche and don't really get alot of interaction, but.... it is lots of content for lemmy which I think is a net positive for the platform.

[–] celeste@kbin.earth 12 points 4 months ago (3 children)

If I'm making the effort to comment or post on topic in a community which mostly gets posts from one or two people, and i get immediate downvotes, I'm going to assume that's a signal I broke an unwritten rule. I probably wouldn't try posting there again.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 4 points 4 months ago

That would make sense if you are assuming that people are acting on good faith...

Can't make that assumption online imho

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 3 points 4 months ago

great point!

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 4 months ago

Good point

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for the post.

About systematically downvoting content, that's indeed a net negative. There was a previous thread almost a year ago on the same topic: https://lemmy.ml/post/13108690

The key thing is that mods should be able to see votes since almost a year (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4386), but because nobody implemented the feature on the front-end, they still can't.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

People who run instances can see the votes already, so we can automate some possible solutions now.

Thanks for the reference to the previous discussion, I had no idea.

One possible response to this would be a slashdot style system where you only get a few downvotes randomly assigned in a interval, so you have to be choosy with them.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 4 months ago

People who run instances can see the votes already, so we can automate some possible solutions now.

It's definitely doable, that would probably help a few mods.

One possible response to this would be a slashdot style system where you only get a few downvotes randomly assigned in a interval, so you have to be choosy with them.

Indeed