If a niche community has people that persistently downvote every post

  1. is that healthy for the community?
  2. 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.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    153·
    10 hours ago

    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.

    • TheAgeOfSuperboredom@lemmy.caEnglish
      5·
      9 hours ago

      I think that analogy falls apart because of Lemmy’s architecture, which makes it a little bit more complicated. In real life, the reach of people is limited. Extending reach IRL requires setting up external tools, like broadcasting, so there is some (albeit small) cost there.

      But in Lemmy’s case, reach is immediately unlimited (barring an instance being blocked by your instance of course). Instances will automatically pull and display your content with no additional effort on your part. Lemmy is even stranger than other federated software because an instance can host a diverse variety of communities, so defederation may not always be the right choice.

      I agree with you if it was like going to a private forum, but Lemmy’s open architecture is causing me to think about this a little more. Mass downvoting could be a signal that a community may be behaving in an inappropriate way. Or, if a community is organizing mass downvotes, that could also be a signal that they are behaving inappropriately. But the beauty of federation is that then is up to the community on the instance (ultimately the admins) to decide how to react.

      Not to mention that in real life people do go to private events to protest. There were all sorts of protests when Tucker Carlson went on tour. I suppose they may not have been in the venue itself, so a bit different as well, but that sort of thing does happen.

    • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      3·
      9 hours ago

      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

      A while back (on a different instance) I got messaged by a user doing something similar after I downvoted something like 3 posts with weeks+ of span between votes. This was also a “community” of just them posting comics daily (and not an obscure one, so there was another user doing the same). They said it was in error but still silently blocked/banned me after (this was with very little interaction beyond the explanation).

      I understand if it’s every post or if it were original heartfelt content/multiple genuine users in a niche community etc, but without that context it just seems silly like it’s an ego thing.

      To me, if it’s worth a reply it probably isn’t worth a downvote and vice-versa. Also it seems perfectly fine to me to judge content or posting context/habits if not taken to the extreme.

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
        51·
        9 hours ago

        Yeah, I’m talking more people who just spam downvotes than anything. There’s definitely an ego angle on the mod side, for sure, but in my own case I let the script and its thresholds take care of that and just review later.

        In the case of my script, it also accounts for upvotes (and the overall up/down ratio and number of submissions for them in the community) as well as the account’s age. I don’t want to publish the thresholds to avoid people gaming them, but I’ve got it pretty well tuned to avoid all but the weirdest false positives. It’s not perfect (tends to err on the side of caution), but at least it’s fair and removes ego/emotion from the mix.