Fedigrow

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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks

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Is it a PTB move to ban a user if their only activity in a community is downvoting posts? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Is it a PTB move ([email protected]) to ban a user if their only activity in a community is downvoting posts?

The behaviour baffles me a bit. If they dislike the majority of the posts in a community, why are they subscribed? Or if they are browsing by /all, why have they not blocked the community? Are they under the mistaken impression that Lemmy has an algorithm which uses downvotes as an indicator for "show me less of this"?

Has anyone else encountered a "serial downvoter" in any of their communities?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I feel this could go several ways.

Troll who just wants to make people feel bad. Ban them.

Person who legitimately thinks content is low-quality, but likes the topic in general (perhaps no other Lemmy community exists for it?) and wants to see better posts. Leave it alone.

Drive-by voter checking in from Local or All (sorting by New makes even small communities visible, so "we're not big" isn't immune), maybe they legit think it's low effort, or hostile and toxic. Or they just see Thing They Don't Like and downvote instead of using the system properly—not quite the same as a troll purposely, maliciously ruining things but in my opinion not a great practice at all, but also not quite a bannable offense, unless they actively subscribe to a community full of things they do not like just to shit on it. And I am guessing right now intent is pretty hard to prove.

Because I can think of reasonable reasons to do this I would err on the side of not punishing a potential innocent. I'd wait at least until you see several extremely high-quality posts that are also inoffensive get downvoted. But I also get that downvoting everything in a community can be destructive. A big community can just shake it off, the upvotes will eventually outweigh the few downvotes. A small one will look like it has crap content if there is ~3 up/3 down to every post.

Also, check patterns outside your community too. Explicit stated intent to ruin community in a comment? Goodbye. Upvotes things outside the community? More chance to be a normal user who's probably got an innocent reason to downvote.