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
    1·
    4 months 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.

  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
    01·
    4 months ago

    The voting system is, essentially, crowdsourced moderation. Once a community is too large for the moderator team to handle every single post and comment, votes can pick up the slack. Downvotes probably shouldn’t be active until a certain community size.

    • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Communities probably shouldn’t get so large that they can’t be actively moderated. Part of what a distributed system like Lemmy allows for is manageable communities.

      We don’t all need to be in the same noise factory, shouting into the crowd just trying to be heard. That actually tends to lead to somewhat hostile behaviour. Smaller, active communities with active moderation, and the same names and avatars showing up over and over again helps create connection, and helps keep people focused on what they want to say, rather than just getting noticed in the first place.