If a niche community has people that persistently downvote every post
- is that healthy for the community?
- is that healthy for lemmy in general?
Examples that come to mind are political communities, linus tech tips, diet communities, etc. There will be a group of people who will not make comments, posts, but will strictly downvote everything that is in the community.
This is a continuation of a discussion @Blaze@feddit.org and I started elsewhere, but it deserves it’s own space for meta-moderation discussion.
A while back (on a different instance) I got messaged by a user doing something similar after I downvoted something like 3 posts with weeks+ of span between votes. This was also a “community” of just them posting comics daily (and not an obscure one, so there was another user doing the same). They said it was in error but still silently blocked/banned me after (this was with very little interaction beyond the explanation).
I understand if it’s every post or if it were original heartfelt content/multiple genuine users in a niche community etc, but without that context it just seems silly like it’s an ego thing.
To me, if it’s worth a reply it probably isn’t worth a downvote and vice-versa. Also it seems perfectly fine to me to judge content or posting context/habits if not taken to the extreme.
Yeah, I’m talking more people who just spam downvotes than anything. There’s definitely an ego angle on the mod side, for sure, but in my own case I let the script and its thresholds take care of that and just review later.
In the case of my script, it also accounts for upvotes (and the overall up/down ratio and number of submissions for them in the community) as well as the account’s age. I don’t want to publish the thresholds to avoid people gaming them, but I’ve got it pretty well tuned to avoid all but the weirdest false positives. It’s not perfect (tends to err on the side of caution), but at least it’s fair and removes ego/emotion from the mix.