Ok, I get it: the majority of users on Lemmy are browsing by "all", which puts a lot of content on their feeds that they are not interested in. I've already got in many arguments to try to explain this is kind of absurd and everyone would be better off if they went to curate the communities they are interested in. But I also understand that this feels a bit like saying "you are holding it wrong".
But can we at least agree to a guideline to not downvote things in communities you are not an active participant, or at least a subscriber? Using downvotes to express "I don't like this", "I don't care about this", or "I disagree with this" is harmful to the overall system. It's not just because you don't like a particular topic that you should vote it down, because it makes it harder for the people that do care about it to find the post.
Downvotes should be used as a way for us to collective filter out "bad" content, but what constitutes "bad" content is dependent on the context and values of the community. If you are not part of the community in question, then you are just using up/down votes as a way to amplify/silence the voice of majority/minority. By downvoting in communities you don't participate, you end up harming the potential of smaller communities to grow, and everyone's feed gets dominated only by the popular/lowest-common-denominator type of content.
Instead of downvoting, a better set of guidelines would be:
- If you don't care about the post, leave it alone.
- If you don't want to see content from a specific community, just block it.
- If the content is actual spam and/or not according to the rules of the community, report it.
Another thing: don't forget that votes are public. Lemmy UI has a very handy feature for moderators that shows everyone who upvotes/downvotes any post or comment. I'm tired of posting content to different communities and be met of a pour of non-subscribers on the downvote side. Yeah, I think we should make some improvements in the software side to have a more flexible rule system for scoring downvotes, but until such a thing does not exist, I'm seriously considering creating a "Clueless Downvoters Wall of Shame" community to mention every user that I see downvoting without a strong reason for it.
Hi there, you seem to be getting a lot of pushpack on this, so I thought I'd just chime in that I agree with what you've written, and have noticed the same problems in the smaller niche communities that I frequent. I worry that this behaviour could be a limiting factor in the growth of niche communities, which Lemmy desperately needs more of.
Do you think moderators could or should consider banning users whose only interaction with the community is downvoting posts? It would seem that the user isn't interested in these posts anyway, and the result would be very similar to if the user had simply blocked the community to begin with.
Note that the votes are currently only public to admins, there was an issue to extend that to mods that are modding the specific community the upvote is in but not sure the status on that
edit: seems to have been merged in a day after 0.19.3 released so it would probably be in the next version
Votes are also public by viewing from kbin
that only shows downvotes made from kbin unless that changed
You're probably right, I just checked my own lemmy.world profile there and I could see all upvotes made from lemmy, but downvotes didn't appear at all. I've seen a lot of people say this and took it at face value I guess. Maybe it is possible with an account or something idk