Fedigrow

1228 readers

90 users here now

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

Resources:

https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
[email protected] to organize overall fediverse growth
[email protected] to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)

Megathreads:

How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
Where to request inactive or unmoderated communities? (A list)

Rules:

Be respectful
No bigotry

founded 11 months ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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]

86 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Glad to hear! As I said, Lemmy is still so young that it makes perfect sense. Even much more mature and much larger communities take similar measures:

Hacker News users cannot downvote anything until their karma is > 500 and even then only comments (not submissions) [source].
Some large Reddit communities such as r/politics hide downvote buttons altogether or for non-subscribed users. They even ran a study back in 2018: Does Hiding Downvotes Improve Behavior in r/politics?

Community cultures vary widely, but in the case of r/politics, hiding downvotes does not appear to have had any of the substantial benefits or disastrous outcomes that people expected.

I'm not saying that downvotes are bad, but that people abusing downvote mechanism are bad and that it's okay to ban such users while bootstrapping a community.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Thank you for the data