There are entire communities full of bad faith actors, spammers, and echo-chamber-enforcing mods. We as individual users downvote them with 0 effect. We can block and hide users/communities/instances but that does nothing for the community as a whole. Ignoring them and “not feeding the trolls” is simply not making them go away. Just try blocking UniversalMonk, we all know they have dozens of accounts with hundreds of downvotes across every comment and post and yet they keep going. Or any of the conservative communities who’s total post score is in the red.
I’ve blocked so much garbage that my feed doesn’t change very often. I barely check Lemmy once a day now. This does not make for a healthy online community.
Many of us came from reddit where there are many valid complaints for how they run things but one thing I’d like to see return is downvotes slowing down how often a user can post, comment, and vote in a community. If a single user’s score drops too low within an instance or community, that user should be rate limited or maybe even auto-banned or maybe an entire third option I can’t think of. But right now it’s not even a slap on the wrist.
The thing we can do is defederate. You can talk to your admins about regular interactions with problematic users on specific instances and see where it goes. If it’s a specific community in general, you can report it to that instance’s admins (something I’ve done that resulted in getting a pedo community removed). This is how you “punish” instances and communities that refuse to enforce good user conduct.
But more broadly, I don’t support downvoting in general, because that leads to lazy commentary and brigading behavior. No thanks. I enjoy being on an instance without downvotes, and I am not interested in a system where “the mob” decides what is valid or invalid, acceptable or reprehensible. Mobs are stupid and gullible.
Ultimately, you need to stop thinking about Lemmy as a single community. We can do what we need to do as users, mods, or admins to protect each instance, but what makes the whole thing good and healthy is the tentative agreement between each part to operate in good faith. It’s not our job to decide what “health” is for all of Lemmy/the Fediverse, and the minute it becomes that, what makes the Fediverse great will have been lost to the thing it despises: centralized authority.