Is it a PTB move ([email protected]) to ban a user if their only activity in a community is downvoting posts?

The behaviour baffles me a bit. If they dislike the majority of the posts in a community, why are they subscribed? Or if they are browsing by /all, why have they not blocked the community? Are they under the mistaken impression that Lemmy has an algorithm which uses downvotes as an indicator for “show me less of this”?

Has anyone else encountered a “serial downvoter” in any of their communities?

  • boramalper@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2610·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • jherazob@fedia.io
      10·
      8 days ago

      I’ve heard this described as “the 1% Rule”, which more or less goes like: In online communities, 1% of the users generate 90% of the content, 9% of the users create 10% of the content by reacting to, modifying or generally interacting with that 1%, and the other 90% of people are lurkers. This fits quite well with what I’ve seen on online communities myself for decades. So, if you alienate that 1%, your community will eventually either disappear or become a hollow reflection of what it used to be.

      • boramalper@lemmy.worldEnglish
        81·
        8 days ago

        Absolutely, and it’s already pretty hard to bootstrap a community organically† to so you should not hesitate to do what’s necessary to keep it healthy as small communities cannot moderate themselves easily.

        † From How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts:

        Well, according to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it ‘til they made it. In the above video for Udacity, an online source for education and lectures, Huffman describes how the first Redditors populated the site’s content with tons of fake accounts.

    • wagesj45@fedia.io
      113·
      8 days ago

      Came in with the opposite view, but this convinced me and changed my mind.

      • boramalper@lemmy.worldEnglish
        121·
        8 days ago

        Glad to hear! As I said, Lemmy is still so young that it makes perfect sense. Even much more mature and much larger communities take similar measures:

        1. Hacker News users cannot downvote anything until their karma is > 500 and even then only comments (not submissions) [source].
        2. Some large Reddit communities such as r/politics hide downvote buttons altogether or for non-subscribed users. They even ran a study back in 2018: Does Hiding Downvotes Improve Behavior in r/politics?

          Community cultures vary widely, but in the case of r/politics, hiding downvotes does not appear to have had any of the substantial benefits or disastrous outcomes that people expected.

        I’m not saying that downvotes are bad, but that people abusing downvote mechanism are bad and that it’s okay to ban such users while bootstrapping a community.