this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
44 points (89.3% liked)

[Closed] Moved to !fedigrow@lemmy.zip

1584 readers
1 users here now

This community has moved to !fedigrow@lemmy.zip

Original sidebar infoTo discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks

Resources:

Megathreads:

Rules:

  1. Be respectful
  2. No bigotry

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Blaze@lemm.ee
threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works
threelonmusketeers@lemm.ee
44
Is it a PTB move to ban a user if their only activity in a community is downvoting posts? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 3 months ago by threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works to c/fedigrow@lemm.ee
82 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Is it a PTB move (!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com) to ban a user if their only activity in a community is downvoting posts?

The behaviour baffles me a bit. If they dislike the majority of the posts in a community, why are they subscribed? Or if they are browsing by /all, why have they not blocked the community? Are they under the mistaken impression that Lemmy has an algorithm which uses downvotes as an indicator for "show me less of this"?

Has anyone else encountered a "serial downvoter" in any of their communities?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] boramalper@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Ban them.

Lemmy is so young (and feeble) that users like those are an actual threat to your community and the larger network by driving away those who actually contribute to the community. In 2019, TrueBirch from Reddit analysed the data and concluded that only 1.9% of users actually comment or post while 98.1% just lurks. When your community is has a thousand or so users, it's entirely reasonable to protect those ~20 users who are creating content for the rest. In fact, the majority of the rest likely don't upvote things either.

[–] wagesj45@fedia.io 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Came in with the opposite view, but this convinced me and changed my mind.

[–] boramalper@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Glad to hear! As I said, Lemmy is still so young that it makes perfect sense. Even much more mature and much larger communities take similar measures:

  1. Hacker News users cannot downvote anything until their karma is > 500 and even then only comments (not submissions) [source].
  2. Some large Reddit communities such as r/politics hide downvote buttons altogether or for non-subscribed users. They even ran a study back in 2018: Does Hiding Downvotes Improve Behavior in r/politics?

    Community cultures vary widely, but in the case of r/politics, hiding downvotes does not appear to have had any of the substantial benefits or disastrous outcomes that people expected.

I'm not saying that downvotes are bad, but that people abusing downvote mechanism are bad and that it's okay to ban such users while bootstrapping a community.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 months ago

Thank you for the data

load more comments (4 replies)