this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Eh, a good community owner will catch the repeat downvoters and ban them. It does exist, but if you're on top of your community you will be able to stop it.
I do not want people banned for voting activity. How is this even an idea with traction? Votes are not real, they can't hurt you. If we are so concerned about the impact of down votes on communities then just remove them from the rank calculations.
If we need to ban people for using the goddamn site mechanics then perhaps those mechanics are just flawed.
I've already explained this, because people value a high-trust community culture. People don't like it when bots, or even individual accounts go to a community and downvote everything on there and keep doing it because they can. It can be corrosive and damaging to new communities viability.
That's another option, but this is what the wider fediverse has gone with currently - regarding downvotes as credible when used fairly.
But again, it's up to community moderators here - not instance owners. Some communities won't care, some will only care if its repeated downvote activity with no interaction, and others will be really bad about it.
Right, so we are going to twist ourselves in circles and allow/enable censorship just for using the site, over a single mechanic which doesn't need to impact anything in the first place? Am I taking crazy pills here? This is such a dumb issue with an easy and obvious solution.
"It's really annoying how this door shocks me every time I use it. I could just disconnect the power source, but whining about it is easier."
People already fairly and unfairly censored all over the website by community owners for how they use a community. There are unjust bans all the time.
Removing downvotes would also have an impact on how content trends, so its not quite as easy as you're alleging here.
Notably a handful of instances do disable downvotes, like blahaj if I recall.
I'm not saying disable down votes. I'm saying make them placebos. Let people "do an engagement" or whatever to give them a sense of pride and accomplishment, but just eliminate them from the actual engagement calculation. There are plenty of other metrics for ranking posts.
Well all the same, visible or not - it would still have an impact as ragebait posts would trend. I don't think that upvote/downvote system myself is nuanced enough anyway, but whilst we have it, it is what it is.
Well the whole thread is about steering the development meta, right? My entire point is that people get really worked up about down votes, and down votes seem to be a big point of contention over a bunch of different issues, so let's advocate for a different approach.
Ragebait will trend either way. If you don't want to engage with it in other communities then ignore it. If it doesn't belong in your community then remove it.
Well as I said, speaking for myself - I banned 5 people on my old television community for doing it. They were downvoting all over the place, and half of them didn't even use lemmy to interact. Just downvoted. Since moving it to piefed, 2 of them came back and started doing it all over again.
I didn't just ban anyone for downvoting.
Ragebait gets hit with downvotes now that means it can't trend.
If it could due to comment activity or downvotes meaning nothing, you'd make it more viable for antagonistic posts to flourish all over the site which would negate the reputation of the fediverse.
There will always be content you don't want to see on the fediverse. For all you know your "ragebait" is another person's valued content and they feel the same way about you down voting it without engagement as you feel about others voting in your community. The best option is to ignore it or block it at an individual level, not rely on a system which seemingly exists on the razor's edge of perception over what constitutes a "valid" vs "invalid" down vote.
By "ragebait" I am referring to callouts, drama, etc trending across the platform.
Also I rarely downvote, or actually think to upvote myself personally - I am just using the system as a community mod to very occasionally remove bad faith downvoters.
Not if always done by what looks to be random accounts, and also that takes effort, which gets harder as a community grows in size.
Yeah, I suppose in my experience - most of the downvoters that caused problems were persistent. You'll never stop downvote noise though. But that also goes for upvote noise.
Unless you limit all votes to only count from subscribers. It would not stop dedicated trolls who simply subscribe purely in order to manipulate votes, but it would halt all casual drive-by noise.
I mean if you limited votes purely to subscribers as a new community, you'd get nowhere because no post would trend for anyone new to find the community.
Hrm... might still be worth it?
Or switch a community only after it increases to a certain size or at least passes an age threshold.
Or only allow votes from "trusted" instances, where moderation practices are actually enforced and serial abusers are detected and banned.
I think it should be completely up to community owners. I have no problem with them being able to make that choice.
It is!:-)