We had a random post in an anarchist community on our Polish speaking instance. Some 45 English speaking accounts came out of nowhere to downvote it, with a single one engaging in discussion. None of them were ever active on the instance, nor particularly in this community. Seems they just followed every crosspost.
Mods could not really do anything about it, so the accounts were banned from the entire instance by admins, as this was considered hostile behaviour against our community.
Which rises the question; should people be able to vote, end specially downvote, in communities they are not a part of? Maybe this could be at least a setting?
Another interesting concept that came from the discussion over that was “constructive downvote” - requirement of commenting why one downvotes a post.
Should people be able to (down/)vote in communities they dont subscribe?
Yes.
If your admins consider down-voting an act of hostility, maybe they should disable down-voting on the instance. Did they consider the possibility that those accounts they banned were bilingual, and simply prefer to interact in English?
Without the context of the post, the actors, etc. it’s hard to justify a position other than, “this is working as intended.” Randos bulk downvoted a post, the spike in downvotes prompted mod action. Everyone got to participate and suffer the consequences of their participation.
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I see two “deep” issues here.
One of them is that it’s damn hard to decide, in online communities, who should [not] be allowed to perform some action in a fair, transparent, and simple way. There’s always some way to circumvent it, and always someone who should perform it but gets locked out.
For example: what would prevent me from subscribing to a comm, downvoting everything there, and then unsubscribing from it? Or just subscribing to comms to vote-brigade them, while newbies legitimately interested on the comm are unable to vote in it?
I have no good solution for this issue.
The second one is that this sort of Reddit-like voting system doesn’t really work well. It’s at most bidimensional (score vs. controversy, or up vs. downvotes); and yet there are a thousand reasons why people vote, and a thousand pieces of info that they can retrieve (or falsely believe to retrieve) from them. And depending on those reasons, the vote might be completely fine or not.
There are also more practical concerns; I believe that @davel@lemmy.ml’s Hexbear example illustrates this well. If you anyhow hamper the ability to voice negative feedback through downvotes, people do it by noisier ways.
For this issue, perhaps a “reverse Slashdot” system would work better? Basically splitting the downvote (but not the upvote) into multiple categories (e.g. “disagree”, “this doesn’t contribute”, “this is factually wrong” etc.). It wouldn’t prevent this sort of voting brigade, but it would discourage it a tiiiny bit (you’d need more clicks per downvote), and make it more obvious.
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I think drive-by (leaning towards off-topic) comments can and should be moderated by the community mods.
IMO you have to browse “all” as there simply isn’t much content without.
Yes, it’s fine.
If you have vote brigading, ban them, take it up with the instance admin, and defederate, in that order.
If the community is public and shows up on All, then yes. I don’t know if lemmy has private sublemmies but if they do, that might be the solution you are looking for.
It does not. Other then running a private/closed instance there’s really no way to limit input from anyone with an account.
If it was deliberate as you say it wouldn’t change much, they could just hit subscribe, downvote, then unsub.
Would it really matter? It’s just as easy to subscribe and then say/do whatever. Only accounts that have been subscribed for a period of time? Subscribe and wait. Have a certain post and/or comment reputation? It’s not terribly hard to speak to a specific audience and accomplish that. Make any of those extra parameters too severe, and you limit the community growth.
Crowdsourcing of ideas means that bad ideas are no worse than good ones, and in an evolutionary way, they’re probably better at replication, strength, retention - and when a core tenet of that “bad” idea is that you must actively reject the opposing good ideas, that’s how bad ideas overtake good ones.
Another interesting concept that came from the discussion over that was “constructive downvote” - requirement of commenting why one downvotes a post.
I think I like that idea.
This just creates an incentive for low-quality shit-post level replies from people who really want to downvote. Rather than “Downvote and move on”, you now have “Comment ‘go fuck urself’, downvote and move on” among people who want to be toxic.
If you know who is being toxic, you can block them.
Sure, but it doesn’t stop their votes from impacting what you see. So it’s just adding an extra annoying step for you, without solving the underlying problem. In fact, I’d say it’s an even worse experience because instead of seeing a post with 30 downvotes and 2 comments, you’ll see a post with 30 downvotes and 32 comments, but they’ll either all be low effort garbage, or they’ll be invisible (because you blocked them). I imagine the moderators don’t want to deal with an influx of reports about this, either; especially because they don’t need the extra step to see who’s doing it and ban them at the community level.
I see your point.
I think I would still like it. I don’t have a problem with it not being implemented because other people wouldn’t like it.
I downvote non-English results I see on my All page as a punishment for not correctly setting the language on the post, which takes 1 second to do and would ensure it doesn’t spam the feed for non-speakers. I can’t imagine I’m alone - was the post in question not correctly tagged as Polish content, like your post is correctly tagged as English content?
If it was correctly tagged, then those downvotes were all from people who speak Polish.
Punish them good.
Removed by mod
This stance has nothing to do with anglocentrism and everything to do with making Lemmy usable. You set your languages in your profile so you’ll only see posts and comments in those languages. No one likes seeing lots of posts in languages they don’t understand, and that that only happens when people are too lazy to set the language indicator. I’d fully expect and encourage non-English speakers to downvote improperly tagged English posts in their feed as well.
I’m not sure that all apps let users set the language of a post.
One thing that would be useful is having the per comm option to disable downvotes. So comms vulnerable/liable to this can just turn off downvotes entirely
Lemmy needs to move away from downvotes altogether, or make it totally pointless. Just because Reddit uses it doesn’t make it a good idea.
