You'll probably appreciate reading this
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
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Megathreads:
- How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
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Down voters are the worst. If I could, I'd force them to maintain a ratio.
They would probably just create dummy communities to artificially increase their ratio.
Having a "cost" per downvote could be another idea. Like you get 5 downvotes per day (but then again, people would probably abuse alts)
It could be gated behind participating in a community before you can downvote in the community, then there is some metabalance for the community itself (i.e. sock puppets would have to post content that passes muster with the moderators to get credit to downvote)
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(3 replies)
Personally, I think no to both points.
I liken it to people intentionally showing up somewhere they clearly don't want to be just to "boo" people minding their own business. See something in /all you don't like and throw it a downvote? Whatever. But making a conscious effort to go in and/or consistently downvote stuff in that community is crossing a line, IMO. At that point, just block the community and move on.
Mods can't (currently?) do much about it, but on my own instance, I can detect that kind of activity with database scripts. They run on a schedule and, after a user hits a certain threshold of strictly negative "participation", the script will ban them from the community.
Quick question for you: is it possible to see downvotes as a mod (not an admin) using Tesseract?
The feature is avaiable in the backend since 0.19.4 (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4386), but never got implemented in the fronted.
Oh, yep. Totally works. I'll have that available to mods in 1.4.28 (releasing in the next day or two).
Amazing !
It can be. I heard that at some point mods were going to be able to see those for their communities, but I wasn't aware it got implemented.
I'll work on in my dev branch and let you know.
That would be great, thanks!
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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:
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Ability to voluntarily unlist from the ALL feed for niche communities.
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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 @[email protected] ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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