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.
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/[email protected] even existed lol. Congratulations u/[email protected], you just advertised this guy’s account to who knows how many people.