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lemmy Lemmy @lemmy.ml
SelfProgrammed @lemmy.today

What if downvotes actually did something?

There are entire communities full of bad faith actors, spammers, and echo-chamber-enforcing mods. We as individual users downvote them with 0 effect. We can block and hide users/communities/instances but that does nothing for the community as a whole. Ignoring them and "not feeding the trolls" is simply not making them go away. Just try blocking UniversalMonk, we all know they have dozens of accounts with hundreds of downvotes across every comment and post and yet they keep going. Or any of the conservative communities who's total post score is in the red.

I've blocked so much garbage that my feed doesn't change very often. I barely check Lemmy once a day now. This does not make for a healthy online community.

Many of us came from reddit where there are many valid complaints for how they run things but one thing I'd like to see return is downvotes slowing down how often a user can post, comment, and vote in a community. If a single user's score drops too low within an instance or community, that user should be rate limited or maybe even auto-banned or maybe an entire third option I can't think of. But right now it's not even a slap on the wrist.

27 comments

  • The purpose of up and down voting is to indicate how viewers feel about content. You aren't going to be able to combat "bad-faith actors" with a downvoting algorithm that wouldn't be better solved by outright blocking or banning temporarily or permanently. Lemmy is FOSS, you can't stop people from making an instance, but you can defederate.

    What instances are you referring to?

  • No that's a horrible idea. It should be up to the Admins and Mods to decide what speech is allowed in their instances and communities. Making downvotes have a negative effect would only encourage bad actors to create accounts solely to downvote people, which will in turn create a black market of buying downvotes, to censor post you don't like, and upvotes, to up censor votes you like.

    This agricultural industry around farming accounts to downvote would overwhelm the Admins with account applications. People could also create instances for se sole purpose of making downvoting bot accounts. You might say those instances could be blocked. True, they would. But this could go from bad to worse considering that this could open the door to instance Admins themselves doing downvote based censorship, since they can create has many accounts as they want.

    Also, I fell like this is relevant:

    The whole point of the Fediverse is since we all want different things from our social media and people will always disagree on something, it is better to have different independent instances, which federate and defederate to create a nice environment for all. People who disagree on something (like whether nsfw content or curse words should be allowed) so much to the point of ruining their experience, they can just go to instances where that content is blocked, instead of spending an eternity arguing over it. This allows for diversity of thought and opinion over the whole system.

    I had no idea u/UniversalMonk@lemm.ee even existed lol. Congratulations u/SelfProgrammed@lemmy.today, you just advertised this guy's account to who knows how many people.

    • Great fucking post, friend. You brought up a lot of points that I never thought of.

      Good on ya, mate.

  • It does do something? It orders how comments and posts appear in the hot sorting algo. That's good enough imo

  • Shouldn’t this be up to the mods of a community and not votes, which can be manipulated or misused?

  • The thing we can do is defederate. You can talk to your admins about regular interactions with problematic users on specific instances and see where it goes. If it's a specific community in general, you can report it to that instance's admins (something I've done that resulted in getting a pedo community removed). This is how you "punish" instances and communities that refuse to enforce good user conduct.

    But more broadly, I don't support downvoting in general, because that leads to lazy commentary and brigading behavior. No thanks. I enjoy being on an instance without downvotes, and I am not interested in a system where "the mob" decides what is valid or invalid, acceptable or reprehensible. Mobs are stupid and gullible.

    Ultimately, you need to stop thinking about Lemmy as a single community. We can do what we need to do as users, mods, or admins to protect each instance, but what makes the whole thing good and healthy is the tentative agreement between each part to operate in good faith. It's not our job to decide what "health" is for all of Lemmy/the Fediverse, and the minute it becomes that, what makes the Fediverse great will have been lost to the thing it despises: centralized authority.

  • I think you make a valid point, in the sense that, ideally, there would be some way for objectively anti-social and toxic content to be removed by the force of popular opinion. However, the trouble is that we can't trust anyone in particular to be the flawless arbiter of such a standard. Mods do their best, or do what they like, but they can be wrong, power-tripping, or simply confused, etc. The masses or people in general also do their best, or do what they like, but likewise can be wrong, power-tripping, or simply confused, etc. Popular opinion cannot always be counted on to go the right way. There are many situations where what is popular is actually deeply disturbed and irrational. The best that we can do in the current social media landscape, is to choose the mods that we trust the most, or at least distrust the least, join their instances, rely on them to do the basics of keeping garbage out of our feeds, and report or block whatever remains that they don't catch by the time we see it.

    I personally chose to block UniversalMonk after checking out their profile just now, because apparently this person thinks that Luigi Mangione is a scumbag. Maybe there's a wave of additional UniversalMonks that I will find over time, and I can block those as well. Is it tedious? Sure. But it's not like I've found an instance that is both capable and willing to handle that for me, so it becomes my job.

    Others in this thread have made valid points as well, as to why using downvotes as a form of control isn't a good idea.

    I personally think that using downvotes to mean "disagree" is not necessarily a misuse or abuse of downvoting. But it often is. It's complicated.

    • I know you won't see this because you blocked me, but just in case I am getting in before you block, I wanted to say you made a great post! I upvoted ya.

      It's strange to me that you would block me because I think Luigi is a scumbag, but that's totally your right. And I still think he's a scumbag. I also feel that history will prove me right; he is not the hero you all think he is.

      But the rest of your post had really great points!

  • Score is relative though. On hexbear we have downvotes disabled. This means we can not down vote but also means down votes do not federate.

    Studies have shown that down votes actually have a large psychological impact negatively on the user. Down votes are frankly unproductive. They might also encourage bad behavior, because if your goal is to stir the pot then down votes are a great indicator that it's working.

    On hexbear we operate on a fork of Lemmy. One of the changes is to the active algorithm, which makes posts decay faster then core Lemmy. Since the change things move pretty smoothly on the front page.

    An automated system of banning is something primed for abuse. We see this already on other platforms that has trigger mechanisms for banning a user pending review. Its a shoot first ask questions later approach that could be weaponized against people.

    Echo chamber is a very loaded term. A safe community is a protected community. To someone intruding on a space that values the community it has built, it might look like bad faith action. However, often the inverse is true, and the intruder is the one acting in bad faith. That could mean they willingly or ignorantly disregard the rules of a space, or are unwilling to listen and understand the perspective of a given space, and simply want to argue.

    The value in Lemmy is that you can build and curate the kind of site culture and ultimately network culture you desire. If you do not like that culture, you can anyways find another place to hang out.

    As it stands, you can implement your ideas using a bot. One thing definitely lacking on Lemmy is a kind of Auto moderator. It should be remembered though that auto moderator was a community built tool until Reddit assimilated it into the site as a core feature.

    • Down votes are frankly unproductive. They might also encourage bad behavior, because if your goal is to stir the pot then down votes are a great indicator that it’s working.

      Yep!!! :)

27 comments