Fedigrow

I'd say just ban them. Doesn't look like a healthy relationship for either side. Worst thing that can happen is they complain and you get to know the reason for their behaviour... And if they're under the impression it will get rid of the posts, banning them will accomplish that, so win-win.

If it's everything (in a community/profile) maybe, particularly if they don't have any contributions elsewhere. Or if it's actually something heartfelt/personal I can see being more touchy about it, less so with bot-like aggregation or reposting old content etc.

Because otherwise, it's not going to be obvious where the line is when you add in time and % of content. If you're using a bot/script to detect voting, you're likely going to ban users just for casual browsing (even if they could explain their votes). Especially as an instance ban purges a user's account (to users of that instance) as if they're on the same level as an SEO spammer. Does a voting disagreement mean the rest of their account is invalid?

I don't know if it's fedi incompatibility or just 0-transparency moderation, but dubvee might be doing this but it's unclear as they seem to be just handing out silent bans (no ban reason stated).

Immediate ban seems overkill. If I were a mod, I would ask the user privately to explain why they are doing this, and decide based on the response. This also puts the user on notice that their actions are being noticed and watched, which itself might cause a change.

Ask your community members, maybe?

I lean towards "go for it! block away" but I come from a different internet culture than reddit so could never mod anywhere similar. You might get better advice from someone who's spent more time in these spaces.

To me, It seems like chronic downvotes from nonmembers could mess up your comm's discovery. And is mildly annoying. Not terrible, but I don't think they need to be evil to get a community block. If you do it too much, your community might stagnate and people might start a new one. Oh well! Good luck to the new guys, imo. You might end up on PTB and get harassed. Always a risk as a mod, unfortunately.

Put "frequent exclusive downvotes from non-members gets a block to increase likelihood of community discovery by people interested in this content" on your profile. I mean, if you talk with your community members and they agree it's an issue.

Ban them.

Lemmy is so young (and feeble) that users like those are an actual threat to your community and the larger network by driving away those who actually contribute to the community. In 2019, TrueBirch from Reddit analysed the data and concluded that only 1.9% of users actually comment or post while 98.1% just lurks. When your community is has a thousand or so users, it's entirely reasonable to protect those ~20 users who are creating content for the rest. In fact, the majority of the rest likely don't upvote things either.

I feel this could go several ways.

Troll who just wants to make people feel bad. Ban them.

Person who legitimately thinks content is low-quality, but likes the topic in general (perhaps no other Lemmy community exists for it?) and wants to see better posts. Leave it alone.

Drive-by voter checking in from Local or All (sorting by New makes even small communities visible, so "we're not big" isn't immune), maybe they legit think it's low effort, or hostile and toxic. Or they just see Thing They Don't Like and downvote instead of using the system properly—not quite the same as a troll purposely, maliciously ruining things but in my opinion not a great practice at all, but also not quite a bannable offense, unless they actively subscribe to a community full of things they do not like just to shit on it. And I am guessing right now intent is pretty hard to prove.

Because I can think of reasonable reasons to do this I would err on the side of not punishing a potential innocent. I'd wait at least until you see several extremely high-quality posts that are also inoffensive get downvoted. But I also get that downvoting everything in a community can be destructive. A big community can just shake it off, the upvotes will eventually outweigh the few downvotes. A small one will look like it has crap content if there is ~3 up/3 down to every post.

Also, check patterns outside your community too. Explicit stated intent to ruin community in a comment? Goodbye. Upvotes things outside the community? More chance to be a normal user who's probably got an innocent reason to downvote.

It’s not considered powertripping as that is a form of vote manipulation.

If it's only downvotes, then a ban is justified.

If their only contribution is downvotes, then it's not really a PTB IMO and should be done.

Is it possible they're a bot?

~~It’s not possible to see unless you’re an admin or use some ActivityPub service that federates with Lemmy but doesn’t hide this information from the end user.~~

That is to say, I would if I could, if there was a malicious pattern. I didn’t understand the outrage that Reddit wanted to do that too (although their ruleset and ways of enforcement are not my cup of tea).

In the meantime, lead by example and refrain from downvoting unless for rule breaking content or offtopic so that toxicity doesn’t increase.

PTB?