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 @Blaze@feddit.org and I started elsewhere, but it deserves it’s own space for meta-moderation discussion.
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.
That is a great idea, it does neatly solve the current problem
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.
So then we should just get rid of downvotes.