Yeah, not the first time I’ve heard that, but I think it’s a bad system for communities that aren’t news/information based. Posts wind up in people’s feed based on upvotes and activity. By only downvoting only based on the rules of the community, it artificially raises the reach of content that the broader instance might not like.
There was a blowup about this a few months ago with the .world vegan community. A lot of posts were obnoxious memes insulting non-vegans, and a mod started banning anyone who ever downvoted them. Posts insulting the majority of the instance suddenly went from 55% upvotes to 95% upvotes and the whole thing became an instance-wide fight. The other mods eventually threw that mod out, but the whole community fell apart.
At the end of the day, it comes down to whether you think it’s the user’s job to block every community they don’t like or the mods job to accept criticism from the broader Lemmy base. I think it’s the former, especially when you consider the new user experience. I don’t think it’s good for a first-time visitor to see a bunch of AI slop or rage-baiting posts with high upvote ratios just because of the individual communities’ guidelines.
For some instances/communities, downvotes are meant to mark content as irrelevant to the topic or not contributing to meaningful discussion.
Yeah, not the first time I’ve heard that, but I think it’s a bad system for communities that aren’t news/information based. Posts wind up in people’s feed based on upvotes and activity. By only downvoting only based on the rules of the community, it artificially raises the reach of content that the broader instance might not like.
There was a blowup about this a few months ago with the .world vegan community. A lot of posts were obnoxious memes insulting non-vegans, and a mod started banning anyone who ever downvoted them. Posts insulting the majority of the instance suddenly went from 55% upvotes to 95% upvotes and the whole thing became an instance-wide fight. The other mods eventually threw that mod out, but the whole community fell apart.
At the end of the day, it comes down to whether you think it’s the user’s job to block every community they don’t like or the mods job to accept criticism from the broader Lemmy base. I think it’s the former, especially when you consider the new user experience. I don’t think it’s good for a first-time visitor to see a bunch of AI slop or rage-baiting posts with high upvote ratios just because of the individual communities’ guidelines.