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.
I think, it can be important, because there are certain niche communities, which themselves have made it their mission to shit on the interest of others. Prime example is that weirdo linuxsucks community. It’s two folks who spend far too much time to find the wildest misinformation, which they think makes Linux look bad.
Leaving aside that it really is just absolutely terrible content, which I cannot imagine anyone browsing /all could possibly want to see, it also is just negative about something that people here enjoy, which I think is negative for Lemmy. Sometimes, they’ll even post stuff that’s borderline offensive and when you report it, well, guess who the moderators of that community are. Without contacting the instance admins to resolve that, downvoting is the only method of moderating a rogue community like that.
Should something be done over this?
Welp, I wanted to link the most recent borderline offensive post, only to see that the newest post is nothing but offensive. I have reported it to the community moderators (one of which is the OP) to follow due process and give them a chance to right themselves. But yeah, if it isn’t gone by the time the guy has made the next post and therefore should’ve seen the report, then I’m reporting it to the instance admins directly.
Apparently, the moderators/posters are now locking each post to prevent people from commenting. That’s how you know they really add to Lemmy.