Fedigrow

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.

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.

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.

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:

1. Ability to voluntarily unlist from the ALL feed for niche communities.

2. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://lemm.ee/post/52051775

You'll probably appreciate reading this