This is not a new issue, but we’ve had reports from some communities that they are experiencing a lot of repeated downvotes from the same set of people.
This is how it typically plays out, using AI images as an example:
- A section of the lemmy user base really hates anything AI generated.
- Instead of blocking AI generated image communities, they down vote those posts every time they see them.
- The posts in those communities effectively have to overcome a “handicap” of down votes each time they are posted. This harms community growth and discoverability.
The admin team would like to know how our community would like us to handle this issue, since it isn’t clear to us what is the best approach, and we would like a consensus view.
Some option for consideration:
- Encourage/allow community mods to ban persistent down voters from their community (note that we currently have no specific rule in place for this, so it is currently allowed).
- Pros: prevents future down votes; essentially “unsubscribes” from the community on their behalf
- Cons: could potentially be abused by mods who want to eliminate all down voters and “game” the system
- Have a policy of ignoring the persistent down voters
- Pros: allows people to continue to express their dislike of [insert topic]-type posts
- Cons: means that communities on topics that are not of interest to (or are actively disliked by) the majority of users will continue to be penalized in the lemmy post feeds.
- Leave it up to the discretion of the individual community mods
- Pros: self-determination and community based approach (i.e. only applied when needed)
- Cons: potentially inconsistent approach to down voters across the instance
Feel free to come up with more options, but these are the three main alternatives I could come up with.
We are interested to get your thoughts on the topic so we can come up with a policy for the instance. Please leave your comments below on your preferred option and the reasons for your choice.
Edit: apparently community mods can’t currently see the voting breakdown in Lemmy, only instance admins can, so this adds further complexity to the issue.
Have you considered turning off downvotes?
That is definitely something to consider, though eliminating downvotes could be problematic since it messes with the way feeds get sorted, and also doesn’t stop downvote trolls from attacking from instances where it is enabled. I’ve seen a lot of this type of abuse on blahaj.zone and beehaw and the vots still get federated on remote users, they just aren’t visible on the instances which disable the downvotes.
You can’t disable downvotes per community only. Only instance-wide
I think they meant Instance-wide, which is something to consider, @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone decided to disable them on Lemmy.blahaj.zone because downvotes are often used aggressively against people who are openly trans or visibly queer, and also for similar reasons we’re having problems, people like to use them to suppress things they personally disagree with, that includes behaviors like mass downvoting of communities and and subjects, up to even using multiple accounts do downvote multiple times. It’s also sometimes used as a method to harass or punish users, by downvoting every one of their posts and comments.