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.
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.
It’s definitely doable, that would probably help a few mods.
Indeed