Fedigrow

1325 readers

2 users here now

To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks

Resources:

https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
[email protected] to organize overall fediverse growth
[email protected] to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
[email protected]
[email protected]

Megathreads:

How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
Where to request inactive or unmoderated communities? (A list)

Rules:

Be respectful
No bigotry

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Is strictly negative participation in a community healthy for lemmy? (hackertalks.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

64 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If a niche community has people that persistently downvote every post

is that healthy for the community?
is that healthy for lemmy in general?

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 @[email protected] and I started elsewhere, but it deserves it's own space for meta-moderation discussion.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

FWIW Hexbear disabled downvotes entirely (after a scandal where an audit revealed that certain users were exclusively downvoting posts of trans users) and it doesn't seem to have resulted in any problems.

We also have a very strict moderation policy though, so this may not be universally applicable.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

and it doesn’t seem to have resulted in any problems.

Has it actually resolved any?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Other than removing the ability of bigots and wreckers from hindering discussions or silencing users by burying posts with downvotes, as barrbaric said:

One healthy side effect is that it encouraged participation in discussions — if you think a take is bad enough to deserve a downvote anyway, you just need to do so in a way that associated with your user account (usually the nifty downbear emoji.) If others disagree with your assessment, they'll reply with why, and it starts a discussion. Now people need to post their dissent publicly.

I was apprehensive about the change when it was originally made but came around on it really quickly, it really made it much more pleasant and friendly to participate in the community.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Well it got rid of the ability of people to downvote and potentially silence (by pushing them off the front page) any posts made by trans users, so I'd say yeah.