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?

  • wagesj45@fedia.io
    113·
    10 days ago

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

    • Bora M. Alper@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      10 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.