rglullis

It is supposed to, but it isn't working. Niche communities are still outnumbered by posts from more active ones and people in the larger instances see content from smaller communities and use the voting system like they are training some algorithm.

I would say the edge cases

What you call "edge cases" is all that I'm seeing. I don't browse by all and I don't go around chasing communities which I know I won't like. I find all the popular ones (news, technology, meme ones, etc) boring beyond belief.

situations like the language one can be implement with a UI fix.

There is already a "UI fix", which is to let people to determine which languages they accept. Thing is, most people don't use it.

The "browse by all" is a similar situation. The system was not designed for it. It's just because the Lemmy network is still too small that people are still using it like that. As soon as the network grows, most people will hopefully realize that it will be impossible to follow the firehose on any instance that is reasonably federated.

I think our misunderstanding is not about the values, it's just a matter of perspective. If you value the same type of content / interaction that of the average Redditor, then you will want different things from those that used to like Reddit because of its niche communities.

the whole post makes a lot of assumptions

Ok, let's talk about it then: I've noticed that almost every post that I make on any smaller communities that I'm trying to bootstrap is met with 2-3 downvotes after a few minutes.

Why is this happening?

• Is the content bad? No, I'm posting news links that are completely related to the topic of the community. Emacs tutorials on the emacs community, NFL news on the nfl community, basketball, TV shows on their shows, etc.
• Is it because the intended audience is not interested in the post? No, the people downvoting are not subscribers. Eventually, the (few) subscribers that are still around do vote it up.
• Is it because I'm violating some instance rule? No, because I'm posting the content in topic-specific instances. Except the Emacs community, all the others community are on the set of topic-specific instances I created.
• Is it a personal attack? No, the people downvoting are not the same. I'm just noticing that while the post will be downvoted by random people until it is "new" and likely to be in the "all" page.

So, the "lots of assumptions I'm making" can be summed up as: posts are getting downvoted by (a) non-subscribers (b) who browse by all and (c) think that downvoting is going to help with curating their feed.

difficult to wrap my head around whether a solution is necessary.

It's not the end of the world, and it's not a hugely complex problem. I was just hoping to get people aware that this "downvoting anything that is not interesting to me" behavior is learned from Reddit (and other Social media sites) and do not translate as well to a place that is so much smaller and has no filter bubble.

I'm not surprised that so many people are acting like I called their baby ugly or something. I know that most people take this learned behavior as the "natural way" of doing things, so I was expecting some pushback. I'm just finding a bit ironic that so many people did nothing but pile on my comments and downvote everything without any further thought.

Let me go for one last attempt:

Non English communities getting downvoted for… not being English (...) deserves a more direct fix than a guideline.

What would you say of "people downvoting posts about football and basketball because they don't care about it"? Or my posts that were on the emacs community, which has about 10 active users per month? Or some other niche TV show that someone wants to talk about and is trying to bootstrap the conversation?

The thing is, your argument is that "big communities can have bad content. I don't want to see that, therefore I should be able to downvote it". And your assumption was that my post was talking about this case. I replied to tell you that this is not the case, and that it's the smaller communities that are hurt the most by those doing drive-by downvoting. You seem to understand that we're are not talking about your case, but you still want to keep your downvote based on a flawed assumption.

my engagement with this post has likely driven it up in this specific instance anyway

Engagement, probably. But would you agree that there is still a lot of herd behavior in sites like this? The people that see this post being at -10 are primed to downvote it further. I'm not saying that you downvote is responsible for every other downvote, but I am saying that it certainly didn't make people more receptive to the idea I'm talking about.

In their own eyes, such content actually should have their rankings lowered, yes?

That's the thing. I don't know exactly when it happened, but going from "votes are used to signal what matters to the community" to "votes are used to signal what matters to me" was a monumental cultural shift that can probably correlate with the deterioration of social media.

It's even worse, because I'm not enforcing anything. I can not enforce it. I am saying "The current way of doing things seems bad. How about trying something different?" and instead of trying to take a look, people are responding by doing exactly the bad things that they deny to exist.

I'm a proposing a guideline, not a law. I don't want to forbid you from doing anything. I'm just saying "hey, Lemmy doesn't have any type of recommendation engine based on your voting history, so maybe consider the context of the community where the post is coming from before voting on whatever it is?"

If you think that you are gaining anything by voting "shitty politics", ok. You do you. But when there are people saying "our non-english community has a bunch of downvotes from english-speaking people", and you understand that this might be an issue, perhaps it would be a nice gesture if you voted this up to help this message reach others?

Either people browse by all because there is not enough content in the communities to follow, or there is already "too many" of the things that they don't want to follow on all, and they should start curating their feed by browsing their subscribed communities.

Which is it? You can not have it both ways.