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.

  • ScrubblesEnglish
    2•8 months ago

    Where are your mods? Mods can see obviously the comments but also downvotes and investigate repeat downvoters

      • Scrubbles
        2•8 months ago

        Hm, that may be the instance owners only, I know I have a “View Votes” option, but I’m an admin. Would be a good thing for mods if they don’t, I know my communities get a lot of trolling and I keep tabs on them.

        • @hamid@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2•8 months ago

          Interesting, thanks for that and what you do to make the fediverse a success!

          I really would like to migrate my communities to my own instance now that I understand how this all works. I think the big change of understanding is that no single instance is reddit replacement but that the communities are subreddit replacements and it would be better to have communities on small well maintained instances all federated with each other than having a massive instance like .world. I’m grateful for Ruud and his team for setting it all up and am not criticizing anyone, just how I understand the architecture to work best.

          • Scrubbles
            2•8 months ago

            That’s exactly what I thought too, that’s why my instance is poptalk.scrubbles.tech, on Reddit we had several communitise based around pop music and I figured rather than just spamming .world and .ml with them that it’d be better to have an instance around them (especially because of the trolling around these communities). Plus with federation then it’s just easier, if X defeds from Y I’m out of the drama because I can fed/defed from anyone I want.