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?
I’ve encountered a few of those users, and personally I ban them.
My criteria:
I know there was one user who was mass downvoting to, according to them, mark posts as read.
I thought that was fairly ridulous, as why not just mass upvote instead to achieve the same effect? Wasn’t sure I fully bought that, as they were dismissive when someone asked them to stop.
Lemmy is still small, and it seems unwise to allow mass downvoting to potentially discourage or limit the reach of people putting in the effort to help this place grow.
I’ve never had a downvoter message me to ask why they were banned or dispute it, so I figure they didn’t even notice that they no longer saw the stuff that caused them to downvote in the first place.
Wow, I’ve not heard that one before. It does seem fairly ridiculous.
I doubt anyone would ever object to banning for the behaviour you described here. But unless I’m way off base, I don’t think that’s what OP is talking about.
What you’re talking about is basically inauthentic behaviour. Maybe it’s a bot, maybe it’s a real person deliberately interfering with a community using sock puppet accounts. What I think OP is talking about is a real user using the platform in an essentially honest way, but which happens to involve downvoting all the posts from one community. There could be a few reasons behind that, such as the example OP described of a user who actually has no interest in ever seeing the community, but doesn’t know how or doesn’t think to block the community. On all other communities, their behaviour appears totally normal.
Ah. I don’t think I’ve encountered that type of user yet. For the users I described in my comment, I give them a full instance ban. But In the case you describe, I think it’d be appropriate for a mod of the targeted community to ban them, but otherwise leave them be.
I thought that at first too, but I recently thought of a counterexample, so I’m not so sure. See my top-level comment if you’re interested.
I agree that reaching out to a user like that and having them stop would be the best outcome. Though In the context of the thread, I don’t think a mod who didn’t reach out before banning would be a PTB (not that you’re suggesting that, just elaborating my thoughts).
Same feeling here
My one school of thought is that popular posts at the top of the frontpage deserve to be downvoted in order to refresh the content.
Why not just sort by Hot, New, or Scaled instead? The popular posts in Active sort will naturally go away as discussion in them dies down (comments boost posts too).
I don’t actually do it and sort by top hour or six hour or hot. But it could be a reason to downvote if the same post is up for days and downvoting hides posts.
It’s possible to hide posts without downvoting as well.
If a post has been up for days, it is probably in the high hundreds upvotes. It would need a huge amount of downvotes to bring it away.
Also, downvoting high quality posts make the “Top of the Week/Month/Year/All time” less relevant