Fedigrow

I have strong opinions here. I view moderating a small community as trying to grow a garden and set the tone such that other people feel comfortable contributing to that garden.

The core problem with negative only participation is it makes the community hostile to new contributors. Most people on lemmy are lurkers, and if they feel that their post will be met with overwhelming negativity they simply wont post.

Downvoting is a form of participation, its a negative signal by design.

If someone hates a community so much they feel they need to downvote it every time they see it, but they don't want to block the community, its totally reasonable for a moderator to help them block the community so it doesn't ruin their lemmy experience (i.e. ban them from the community so they don't see it anymore)

You need to know why.

I went through days on Reddit where I would not find something posted that I wanted to upvote and found posts that, while maybe good for another community, were not fitting my definition of the intended topic. As a non-mod, you can't directly shape the content, but you can vote.

Like you said, they also might not understand that downvoting things from a particular community will not make it show up less.

Just ask them. If they're a jerk, you can still ban them. If they are ignorant but cool, you can help them be a better netizen.

It's situational.

By itself, down voting but not otherwise interacting is fine. Hell, one of the uses of votes is to let the sorting work, so down votes are a valid form of interaction.

But, some people abuse that. So, if the pattern of their voting shows that they're targeting a single user, or trying to manipulate the ranking to shift sorting artificially, or points to some other bad actorship, mod intercession would be a valid choice.

However, a ban would not be an acceptable first intervention. That would be overreach, going beyond the scale of the issue. Contacting the user first would be the appropriate step. Remember, lemmy is still small enough that we can at least try to treat each other like people instead of just words on a screen.

Let me use a personal example to illustrate why contact first is the better option.

There is a community, which I won't specify to avoid causing them grief, that is dietary based. Because of my background, I have a higher than usual grasp of the general subject, and have higher personal standards for health claims surrounding fad diets.

As such, when I would scroll past posts on that community that were factually incorrect, or didn't give supporting evidence outsider of a YouTube link, I would down vote it without any further action or interaction. Early on, the only posts were being made by the mod of the community, and they noticed that not only was I down voting almost everything on the C/, but that was all I was doing.

On the surface, that can look sketchy, right? Some rando just down voting with no observable pattern.

So, they contacted me. Asked what I was doing and why. I explained pretty much what I said here, and the conversation was pleasant. That started adding in text that gave more info than just linking to a video, which means that people scrolling by weren't just hit by what amounts to ads for a fad diet, which is a major problem that isn't really discussed much, but can have massive effects on people's health.

With the extra effort in place, the posts ceased to have that same quasi-subliminal effect where people just absorb it passively due to it being background noise. So, I no longer needed to down vote those posts, and ceased doing so; reserving down votes for posts that either weren't on topic for the C/, or contained things that amount to disinformation.

That interaction gave me a ton of respect for that mod, even though I still disagree with what their community "advertises" based on my knowledge out nutritional best practices. It also made me willing to check their linked videos on occasion to see if maybe my knowledge and current best practices should change to incorporate that diet as practical and healthy. So far, all I've seen is that it's less harmful than I thought, but that's going too far off topic.

Looping back to your specific quandry, I think that it's always worth trying to communicate. Lemmy really is a unique social experiment, and the best part about it is the people. As long as we all try to handle things person-first, we have a high chance at things staying more like a community than a disconnected bunch of user names that might as well be bots for all we care.

Now, being real, humans are assholes. So chances are that your attempt at communication will fail, and may fail with them being a giant, gaping, stinking asshole. But I think it's still best to make the attempt before moving on to other options.

If they're an asshole, then you ban them on grounds of community interference. If they aren't, then maybe something good comes out of it.

Bans like that are a valid and useful tool. Anyone saying otherwise doesn't understand what it takes to keep a forum running smoothly. But it has to be a scalpel, not an axe. It's way too easy to slip into being a power tripping bastard that ruins the very community you're trying to keep healthy. If you find yourself reaching for that ban hammer before trying other things, it's time to get some backup. Find someone to help take the load off, to spread the stresses of having to police a community and yourself.

Yep, they get banned. End of story. Though I'd be willing to unban them if they appealed and explained their behavior. Or if there was a mistake on my end, obviously

PTB. This thread is insane to me. If one person is downvoting posts, so fucking what? Just because they only downvote means their opinion is less valid? Maybe the content just sucks. If this is banworthy, then I might just be done with Lemmy already bc this is some petty bullshit.

My initial reaction when I read your posts was 100% support for banning them. They'd be better off blocking the community so it never shows up in their feed. But in the hours since, a counter argument occurred to me that I'd like to present.

Lemmy is, as many have said, still a relatively young and small platform. The range of content on it is limited not just by what subjects have communities, but what the individuals posting in those communities happen to be interested enough in to share.

A user might not want to block a community because they do like the subject of that community and want to read about it. But maybe only one user is actively posting content, and the subset of interest in the subject for user A just doesn't match the subset of user B. Naturally, they end up downvoting all the content at present. Where in a hypothetical that there were hundreds of active users posting in that community, the user would only downvoted a small fraction.

As a hypothetical, imagine I create a !classicalmusic community. I'm a big fan of classical music, especially Beethoven and the Romantics. I post a heap of discussion about Romantic theory, recordings of Beethoven Symphonies, Rachmaninoff Sonatas, etc. Because it's a small community, I'm the only one posting.

Then you come along, a huge Bach fan. You don't mind some Classical era stuff like Mozart and Haydn, but you can't stand the Romantic era. You downvote everything I post.

In my opinion, unless you want to get even more into the weeds and enforce the idea of "downvotes are only for off-topic and spam content, not for dislike" (which, I agree in theory is how the best users treat it, but let's be honest…it doesn't happen in practice), I don't think I should ban you.

Maybe I could send off a DM asking you to explain your downvotes, and I would ban you if you came back and said "I don't want to see classical music in my feed" (along with a recommendation that you use the block feature). And I'd try to encourage you to participate more in submitting the stuff you do want to see. But an attempt to figure things out some other way would be better than a ban, in that case.

While lemmy is still small I think its worth asking them what's up. Is there a timeout/suspension function? Suspend their account for 30 days.

If they only downvote everything, I think they deserve a ban.

I've encountered a few of those users, and personally I ban them.

My criteria:

1. They must be downvoting a majority of posts, where it's clear there is no real discrimination on quality (as then some posted close together would be spared)
2. I notice it happening across multiple communities/instances
3. I see the same name again and again, day after day
4. I never see that user upvote anything anywhere

I know there was one user who was mass downvoting to, according to them, mark posts as read.

I thought that was fairly ridulous, as why not just mass upvote instead to achieve the same effect? Wasn't sure I fully bought that, as they were dismissive when someone asked them to stop.

Lemmy is still small, and it seems unwise to allow mass downvoting to potentially discourage or limit the reach of people putting in the effort to help this place grow.

I've never had a downvoter message me to ask why they were banned or dispute it, so I figure they didn't even notice that they no longer saw the stuff that caused them to downvote in the first place.

Have you tried messaging them?

How do you see who is up and down dooting posts?