Fedigrow

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

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How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
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founded 11 months ago

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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 5 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] 16 points 5 days ago (6 children)

Ban them.

Lemmy is so young (and feeble) that users like those are an actual threat to your community and the larger network by driving away those who actually contribute to the community. In 2019, TrueBirch from Reddit analysed the data and concluded that only 1.9% of users actually comment or post while 98.1% just lurks. When your community is has a thousand or so users, it's entirely reasonable to protect those ~20 users who are creating content for the rest. In fact, the majority of the rest likely don't upvote things either.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Came in with the opposite view, but this convinced me and changed my mind.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 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 5 days ago

Thank you for the data

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