Context: PugJesus often spams low quality posts across the dozen or so communities they mod, apparently downvoting low effort spam on my frontpage is trolling. The only other action in the modlog is a different ban for 74 years for “Mass downvoting innocuous content,” so it definitely seems they are just banning people that dislike their spam. Glad we’re not missing out on the reddit mod experience here.
I do think this is how it was designed, otherwise a subscription to the community (or even activity) would be required for you to vote. This would go for up & down votes.
And it would clearly mean a lower engagement overall.
And if the upvotes don’t disrupt the community then neither should the downvotes suppress then - that’s a matter of algorithms for active/hot/etc.
Yes, I myself, & I suspect the majority, either upvote or don’t vote on random posts in all, but downvoting something by your human self from one account (only) can’t/shouldn’t be that disruptive - and if more ppl do it, than that is just the message from the verse (a smol one tho, I suspect there aren’t many such users).
But if some admins and/or mods want to microcurate their communities like homogeny is the main goal, then I guess the path of inclusiveness is out the window (I assume a downvote isn’t like a fascists/bigoted rhetoric threatening inclusiveness itself tho).
Also I strongly believe we should include ppl who just vote & don’t comment or post (not all can/are capable to engage further that a vote).
Downvotes do literally ‘disrupt’ a community though by reducing a community posts visibility. Sometimes that’s legitimate in the sense that the post is in itself, based on the purpose of the community, ill-thought out, ill-devised, off-topic etc. Other times it’s just based on the other users dislike of the community to the point where they downvote anything from that community they see. And we then are where we are. This thread.
Now OP claims that they just downvoted based on their perception of the quality, not based on the community itself - and maybe that’s true, but from a moderators perspective, if you’re downvoting most posts on their community and offering no context, they’re just going to assume active community vandalism.
Yeah, I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt the visibility, just that it’s the same (but ofc opposite) with upvotes.
With that in mind folk could go aground banning folk that commit mass “commented but not voted in/on a post”. Or (if the data was shared) “seen but not upvoted” bcs lower upvotes can really hurt a community.
Like, as a guideline (as described above), what should be the exact difference between not voting and downvoting to actively participate in fediverse?
I don’t downvote posts that often (especially if a post is both low effort & not funny, which OP mentions, that just translates to me as a no-vote).
(And a step further I also posed the question if algorithms for visibly should be changed. Especially since “mass downvoting” isn’t a common problem bcs of that, even if legitimate, it shouldn’t noticeably affect a community. Basically all posts get at least a few downvotes, why not microadjust the instance’s algorithm for active to account for that?)
Obviously banning people who don’t vote at all, if you could see that data would be absurd because most people won’t be upvoting or downvoting a given post.
All of this is context-based. I can only tell you my experience, when I was growing [email protected] before lemm.ee shut down, the community collected about 5 frequent downvoters. None of these accounts ever upvoted. They never participated by posting or commenting. In a few cases, two of the accounts had no posting history on the fediverse at all. They existed purely to downvote. Whether because they didn’t like television as a topic, or hated news articles being posted - I don’t know. But they would, between them, always downvote posts and sometimes do so early - deprecating their visibility.
I think it’s reasonable for a community moderator to decide that these accounts are unwelcome and ban them.
Rip lemm.ee, I really liked it there.
I think that in such cases, a few downvotes, the visibility should not be affected (like it is) bcs that’s still engagement & it’s to early to tell by the votes if it’s a good or a bad post - so more of a systemic problem than user problem (unless that was very targeted, then bannaning them is good too).
All of the users in this case that I banned had a history of doing it in many communities. They were all just serial downvoters.