this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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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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My initial reaction when I read your posts was 100% support for banning them. They'd be better off blocking the community so it never shows up in their feed. But in the hours since, a counter argument occurred to me that I'd like to present.
Lemmy is, as many have said, still a relatively young and small platform. The range of content on it is limited not just by what subjects have communities, but what the individuals posting in those communities happen to be interested enough in to share.
A user might not want to block a community because they do like the subject of that community and want to read about it. But maybe only one user is actively posting content, and the subset of interest in the subject for user A just doesn't match the subset of user B. Naturally, they end up downvoting all the content at present. Where in a hypothetical that there were hundreds of active users posting in that community, the user would only downvoted a small fraction.
As a hypothetical, imagine I create a !classicalmusic community. I'm a big fan of classical music, especially Beethoven and the Romantics. I post a heap of discussion about Romantic theory, recordings of Beethoven Symphonies, Rachmaninoff Sonatas, etc. Because it's a small community, I'm the only one posting.
Then you come along, a huge Bach fan. You don't mind some Classical era stuff like Mozart and Haydn, but you can't stand the Romantic era. You downvote everything I post.
In my opinion, unless you want to get even more into the weeds and enforce the idea of "downvotes are only for off-topic and spam content, not for dislike" (which, I agree in theory is how the best users treat it, but let's be honest…it doesn't happen in practice), I don't think I should ban you.
Maybe I could send off a DM asking you to explain your downvotes, and I would ban you if you came back and said "I don't want to see classical music in my feed" (along with a recommendation that you use the block feature). And I'd try to encourage you to participate more in submitting the stuff you do want to see. But an attempt to figure things out some other way would be better than a ban, in that case.
Something about this would seem kind of selfish to me. Just because I don't like the Romantic era doesn't mean I should try to bend the entire !classicalmusic community to my will. My efforts would be better spent posting to or creating !baroquemusic, !romantic_era, etc.
As it happens, I happen to like both the baroque and romantic eras :)
I'll leave this here for anyone else who might be interested: [email protected]
Right, but this comes down to that same discussion I alluded to but largely wanted to avoid (due to irrelevance) about whether the downvote is for disliking content, or whether it should only ever be for off-topic and spam. You're just never going to get a situation where people stop using it for content they dislike.
You could by having different types of votes compared to the binary up/down
Seems like downvoting everything you post instead of posting some Bach content is quite counterproductive.
Is it? It's already been established elsewhere in this thread that there's a pyramid of users. The majority lurk. The cast majority of what's left only ever vote. The majority of the rest only comment. And only a small fraction actually create posts. We're not going to change that just by hoping.
But you're right, it would be better if they posted. And that's why I suggested DMing them to initiate a conversation. I'd ask them if they could post more of their own stuff.
I agree with the pyramid of users, but I would add a distinction: everybody is free to lurk, there's no impact on the platform. Systematically downvoting on-topic content due to personal preferences without explaining why only demotivates the (in this scenario) only poster and reduces the visibility of their on-topic content.
I'm not hoping to change a voter to an active poster, just reducing their negative impact on the community.