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.
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 Now people need to post their dissent publicly.I was apprehensive about the change when it was originally made but came around on it really quickly, it really made it much more pleasant and friendly to participate in the community.
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.
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.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.
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.
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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.
