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.
https://lemmy.ca/c/endlesswar has this problem. And me mentioning it will make it probably worse. While Lemmy is ultra progressive, it somehow simultaneously identifies as ultra pro empire, and their fake progressive bots need to keep the narrative.
The US military bots to user ratio is way too damn high on Lemmy, but evil misinformation/manipulation being wrong is not going to stop it.
FWIW Hexbear disabled downvotes entirely (after a scandal where an audit revealed that certain users were exclusively downvoting posts of trans users) and it doesn’t seem to have resulted in any problems.
We also have a very strict moderation policy though, so this may not be universally applicable.
and it doesn’t seem to have resulted in any problems.
Has it actually resolved any?
Well it got rid of the ability of people to downvote and potentially silence (by pushing them off the front page) any posts made by trans users, so I’d say yeah.
Other than removing the ability of bigots and wreckers from hindering discussions or silencing users by burying posts with downvotes, as barrbaric said:
One healthy side effect is that it encouraged participation in discussions — if you think a take is bad enough to deserve a downvote anyway, you just need to do so in a way that associated with your user account (usually the nifty
emoji.) If others disagree with your assessment, they’ll reply with why, and it starts a discussion. Now people need to post their dissent publicly.I was apprehensive about the change when it was originally made but came around on it really quickly, it really made it much more pleasant and friendly to participate in the community.
I think, it can be important, because there are certain niche communities, which themselves have made it their mission to shit on the interest of others. Prime example is that weirdo linuxsucks community. It’s two folks who spend far too much time to find the wildest misinformation, which they think makes Linux look bad.
Leaving aside that it really is just absolutely terrible content, which I cannot imagine anyone browsing /all could possibly want to see, it also is just negative about something that people here enjoy, which I think is negative for Lemmy. Sometimes, they’ll even post stuff that’s borderline offensive and when you report it, well, guess who the moderators of that community are. Without contacting the instance admins to resolve that, downvoting is the only method of moderating a rogue community like that.Without contacting the instance admins to resolve that,
Should something be done over this?
Welp, I wanted to link the most recent borderline offensive post, only to see that the newest post is nothing but offensive. I have reported it to the community moderators (one of which is the OP) to follow due process and give them a chance to right themselves. But yeah, if it isn’t gone by the time the guy has made the next post and therefore should’ve seen the report, then I’m reporting it to the instance admins directly.
Apparently, the moderators/posters are now locking each post to prevent people from commenting. That’s how you know they really add to Lemmy.
A reminder, Hexbear decided to get rid of down votes almost immediately after it was started. Policy was you could leave a comment if you had a gripe about something, and people could tell you to shut up.
The purpose and shape of a community should be up to the moderator. If someone wants to grow a “community” full of complaining and whining (and there are absolutely people who do) that should be up to the mods.
That said, I think downvote abuse is super annoying, not healthy for “Lemmy in general” and would personally prefer it banned in communities I participate in.
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.
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.
That is a great idea, it does neatly solve the current problem
If you think your community has a real problem with this, sock-puppet accounts from people who have it out for an individual or community for some reason, the admins might be able to help.
Right now I don’t think I’m dealing with anything super malicious just the standard:
Unhappy Camper
Nah, it looks more like you run a contentious community and are playing shocked that people who you know disagree with you downvote your posts when they see them in all. And some posts have 0.
Some might even just dislike the food presented, like the boiled in butter video.
And to be clear I am far from a vegan, I really like to sautée vegetables* in butter. I don’t need meat for that to be good, but meat and vegetables are so much better prepared in a meal together. Also too-tall burgers that need to be deconstructed are a failure.
*= recently found out even celery and radishes are good this way, much better than raw
My personal view - its a net negative,
for the community itself. It is a chilling effect, discouraging people from posting. Yes the votes don’t matter, but they are a social signal, and people (especially infrequent posters) can be hyper sensitive to that.
For Lemmy as a whole, I think its also a net negative, people only participating to rain on other peoples parade isn’t driving engagement (see above), but it means their feed is filled with posts they don’t like, reducing the quality and interaction of their experience.
Possible Solutions:
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Ability to voluntarily unlist from the ALL feed for niche communities.
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Moderation bot that looks at strictly negative interactions in a community and help those users “block” the community. i.e. someone who never posts comments, or ever finds anything positive in the community.
Thoughts @Blaze@feddit.org ?
Context - Right now I moderate two communities that are basically my personal journals, since they are so niche and don’t really get alot of interaction, but… it is lots of content for lemmy which I think is a net positive for the platform.
If I’m making the effort to comment or post on topic in a community which mostly gets posts from one or two people, and i get immediate downvotes, I’m going to assume that’s a signal I broke an unwritten rule. I probably wouldn’t try posting there again.
That would make sense if you are assuming that people are acting on good faith…
Can’t make that assumption online imho
Good point
great point!
Thank you for the post.
About systematically downvoting content, that’s indeed a net negative. There was a previous thread almost a year ago on the same topic: https://lemmy.ml/post/13108690
The key thing is that mods should be able to see votes since almost a year (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4386), but because nobody implemented the feature on the front-end, they still can’t.
People who run instances can see the votes already, so we can automate some possible solutions now.
Thanks for the reference to the previous discussion, I had no idea.
One possible response to this would be a slashdot style system where you only get a few downvotes randomly assigned in a interval, so you have to be choosy with them.
People who run instances can see the votes already, so we can automate some possible solutions now.
It’s definitely doable, that would probably help a few mods.
One possible response to this would be a slashdot style system where you only get a few downvotes randomly assigned in a interval, so you have to be choosy with them.
Indeed
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Lemmy needs to allow communities to ignore the votes of non-subscribed users. It should be the default setting that a community owner can override. But it will never happen. So the lemmy ecosystem will remain not very diverse in its user base unless there are multiple clusters of federated instances that are not (widely) federated with the other clusters.
Hopefully Sublinks can get to production and implement this.
PieFed will implement this feature by the end of the weekend.
Amazing!
Hopefully Sublinks can get to production and implement this.
Has development resumed? I’m on the Matrix chat, things have been still for a few months now
That is a great idea, only subscribers can vote, its elegant in its simplicity!
Never heard of sublinks, but I’ll do some research.
Never heard of sublinks, but I’ll do some research.
Don’t get your hopes too high, project has more or less stopped due to real life priorities of the devs.
https://piefed.social/ should be more interesting
I suppose what I want is the api vocabulary to unsubscribe a user from a community without necessarily blocking them. The effect being this community wont show up in the downvoters all feed.
You’ll probably appreciate reading this
Down voters are the worst. If I could, I’d force them to maintain a ratio.
They would probably just create dummy communities to artificially increase their ratio.
Having a “cost” per downvote could be another idea. Like you get 5 downvotes per day (but then again, people would probably abuse alts)
It could be gated behind participating in a community before you can downvote in the community, then there is some metabalance for the community itself (i.e. sock puppets would have to post content that passes muster with the moderators to get credit to downvote)
My idea is requiring a user to have X amount of posts in a community before they can downvote posts in said community.
I’m not sure about posts. Comments maybe, but there are a lot of people who will only comment and never post, and that’s okay.
Yeah you’re right, should be comments rather than posts.
