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.
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.
@Flora IMO The solution is not to treat this as a systemic problem but rather a UI problem.
The key is not to rely on some method to make the people that you don't want to hear from go away (putting that diplomatically) but rather to not have their stuff shown to you because you don't want to see it.
In other words, let the trolls talk and talk until they are blue in the face and run out of oxygen. Just don't show it to me,. Then it's not about objectively judging who is or who is not a troll, it's just, I don't want to see that, so I shouldn't see that.
So it's a UI/UX problem. There's no objective way to solve it? Right, so let's treat it in the subjective domain.
How does this work practically? Well, just off the top of my head let users have a lot of control over their own block lists, or let them subscribe to moderators who approve or disapprove certain posts to appear on lists, things like that.
Maybe I want to see a little more edgy content. Maybe you want to see a little less. We can both be satisfied if we treat this as subscribing to moderators or judges that will mark them as more edgy or less edgy.
I really believe this is the way forward.
