I read in lemmy support that this is a significant problem. I don’t get it. What does anyone gain in down voting without reason?
I read in lemmy support that this is a significant problem. I don’t get it. What does anyone gain in down voting without reason?
Not everyone is worth engaging with.
How come you’re only focusing on downvotes but not upvotes? People can give their approval without question but if they disapprove then they must explain themselves? Sounds like toxic positivity.
If you approve someone, you don’t need to explain yourself, you would just say “I agree with this guy”. There’s no substance to it.
However, if you downvote, you are saying “this is wrong”. Which is much different. When you accuse someone of being wrong, you should explain yourself, otherwise you’re being a dick.
It’s fine if someone already answered with what you were going to answer. You can just upvote that guy and move on.
Downvotes degrade post visibility. So if I go into a community and downvote every post, it hurts the community. At least if its a smaller community. If the mod then spots that, they may reasonably decide to ban me.
Obviously larger communities wouldn’t notice.
And? Upvotes increase visibility.
Why is one bad but the other is acceptable?
It’s also not an issue in “smaller communities” because there’s not enough content to bury heavily-downvoted posts anyways.
Correct. And communities aspire for visibility. So someone coming into a community to downvote all the posts will potentially be banned for harming that communities visibility.
Because the point of the Fediverse is to grow, not degrade. Also, it’s not downvoting per se that is viewed as inherently harmful - it’s bulk downvoting of posts. If someone who doesn’t like metal music enters [email protected] and downvotes every post there - and commits themselves to doing it to every new post, this hurts their visibility across the Fediverse. Would you not say its reasonable, in this specific hypothetical, for the community owner to ban a user who does that?
A newly made post that gets downvoted to 0 quickly after being posted is rendered effectively invisible on the fediverse. I’ll give you my own experience: When I was growing [email protected] before lemm.ee shut down, the community collected about 5 frequent downvoters. None of these accounts ever upvoted anything. They never participated by posting or commenting anything on the community. In a few cases, two of the accounts had no posting history on the fediverse at all. They existed purely to downvote. Whether because they didn’t like television as a topic, or hated news articles being posted - I don’t know. But they would, between them, always downvote posts and sometimes do so early - deprecating their visibility. After I banned them after a time, I noticed an improvement on the community.
If you’re not making posts that the community members want to see, then they are justified in downvoting you so that they do their part to influence the culture of the community.
The fact that you’re only targeting downvoters and not upvoters leads me to believe you want to surround yourself with yes-men instead of authentic humans.
If you think 5 people downvoting you is what’s stopping your posts from gaining visibility, then you are simply incorrect. Lemmy is still very small and most communities that aren’t tech or politics aren’t “visible” because they lack activity.
The point is non-community members downvoting everything. When there are five people active in a community, five non-communists downvoting everything can seriously hurt the community’s reach even when people are browsing their subs with a scaled sort.
If they’re not interested in metal music then they’re not ever going to be part of the community, so if they don’t want to see anything there - there can just block the community. That’s what the block button for communities you don’t like is for.
Why should a metal community orientate itself and placate itself to what people who don’t like metal like? If someone started downvoting all metal music videos on the community and said they were doing so because they don’t like metal, then why would I keep them around to keep doing that?
I don’t look at it anymore for the most part. Most people upvote as a matter of normality. I want content to spread across the fediverse.
The community was much smaller then, and they would hurt visibility by getting in quickly and preventing the posts from trending. I don’t really know how you can also claim that multiple accounts with no post history, and sometimes no upvoting history were remotely authentic accounts sincerely interested in meaningfully positively impacting the fediverse.
I don’t have the energy to keep engaging with you, so I’m just going to downvote and move on.
Have a nice day.
You asked, I answered. :shrug:
A bit like being nice and polite would seldom be frown upon but acting like a dick would?
Can you make your argument without resorting to inaccurate analogies? That way we can focus on the topic instead of getting derailed.
That is not reasonable…
Do you do that?
Because if so I’ll block all your communities right now even tho you got some good ones.
That is childish behavior and any mod that engages in that, is likely doing other shit that isn’t as obvious. And I just want no part of it. I’ll go to any other community or make my own if it doesn’t exist.