In the monthly server updates for lemmy.zip/piefed.zip there's a mantra that's repeated every month. I think it's wonderful and can be applied to the Fediverse as a whole.

If you’re new here - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)

Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give the Fediverse (Original: Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip) isn’t money, praise, or interpretive dance (although we would absolutely accept the last one). Its participation.

Upvote the things you like. Start a discussion, debate, or ponder about whether water is wet or merely makes things wet. Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits your oddly specific niche obsession.
(We don’t judge. Well, we try not to judge anyway.)

The fediverse naturally ebbs and flows, tides of people come and go. But if you’ve found yourself oddly attached to this strange little corner of the internet? Wonderful. Help it breathe. Help it grow. Help it be just a tiny bit weirder in the best possible way.

So if you’ve gone to the effort of clicking Sign Up and proving you’re not a robot (unless you are, in which case hello and welcome to our new AI overlords), then please, I beg of you:

Stick around. Add your voice. It really does make this place better.

Original post by @Demigodrick@lemmy.zip

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[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

All decent advice. Here's a thought experiment.

Start a discussion, debate, or ponder about [etc]

By the same token it would be bad to stop such a discussion, right? Right.

Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits

Therefore it would be bad to *destroy" such communities, right? Indeed.

Upvote the things you like

So, it would be bad to downvote the things you - personally, subjectively - don't like - right? It wouldn't? Why so?

Don't downvote other people's good-faith opinions. It's petty, it's juvenile, it's toxic. Even if you don't see it that way. It's precisely what will discourage the participation we all want to see.

[–] ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Because the fediverse is still fairly small, downvotes stick out a lot more. A number of them I think, "How could anybody downvote that?" and just wonder because often they seem to be "I had a shitty day and I particularly don't like YOU" downvotes.

I often sort a thread by Top, and even the highest voted posts are often +(big number) -1. Because I personally do not downvote without cause, I assume they are sincere, but then it becomes a question of why, and I could never figure it out. Okay, whatever, no biggie.

But recently I had some time on my hands and I am aware of lemvotes.org, so one day I saw this again and decided to just informally start looking up these weird ass loner downvotes. Nothing sustained, just whenever one stuck out to me as being why??? I'd go and look it up. I've been doing this for roughly 2-3 months now, no schedule or commitment other than whenever I felt like it, across the board, no attention paid to community or post content (other than anything political pretty much not being worth the trouble, lol).

What I expected was a variety of usernames attached to these single downvotes.

But what I saw was a core handful of users across the board, with the occasional outlier.

Kinda pathetic, honestly.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So you're saying that (you think the data says) most people here are not blanket-downvoting anything that gives them marginally bad vibes, and that the damage is being done by a busy few? Interesting if true. I too basically never downvote, on the principle that it's toxic and hostile and just not something that has a polite equivalent in person. I had assumed I was a massive outlier.

[–] ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago

I think blanket downvoting happens regularly in political communities and discussions, and a lot of time you can see it without even looking up any votes: if every single comment in a six-comment thread has two downvotes and three upvotes, it's pretty clear. I looked those political ones up a few times but don't even bother anymore. Everywhere else, by which I mean non-political and/or non-controversial topics, it genuinely seems to be just a core handful of users.

And no, you're not an outlier, just a decent person. I like to think most of us vote for actual cause, and that it's only a handful who don't. But at some point I do think the admins are going to have to deal with it, because downvoting just to downvote IS toxic and does tend to have a stifling effect on the discussion and community as a whole.

[–] eta@feddit.org 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Interesting. Could you also see a reason for why they downvoted? Do they downvote a specific type of content or do they downvote just about everything?

[–] ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

These single downvotes were never followed up by further commentary, and at least one of them looks like a voting-only account with zero posts, so the more I looked the more they just seemed like fuck you votes.

I really don't think there's any link to content at all because I did this across multiple communities (whatever I don't have actively blocked that crosses my feed) and it was largely the same handful of downvoters throughout, but with outliers here and there. I wasn't taking notes, but when I started to see the same names over and over in wildly disparate communities it seemed less and less likely it had anything to do with content.