this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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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.