Personally I factor this in with bans on my communities. I very rarely ban, but I do if I notice people like this, who I dub “downvote trolls”. They don’t participate (or when they do it’s negatively), the just downvote constantly.
Now I’m fine with downvotes, I downvote, I think it’s healthy to say “I don’t like this content”. However if all you do is downvote (especially in a specific community) then I view a ban as a win win. We don’t have to deal with your negativity and obviously you don’t enjoy being here anyway from your voting patterns, so everyone wins.
For my communities I have a pretty healthy ratio. If you downvote 80% of the content, you’re on my radar. I won’t ban you on that data alone, but seriously 4 out of 5 votes on the community are on average down then why are you there?
Personally, I agree (we would never do this in a large community for the record). But yes, there are people who think that they can “kill” a small community with downvotes because they don’t like the topic.
The sad thing is, it’s true. In a community where most posts have under 5 or so votes, one person coming in and systematically downvoting every post will keep people from seeing it who may be interested. If someone doesn’t like a topic, they can block the community, but when they take steps to prevent others from seeing it, that’s toxic. It’s bad for the health of the platform.
Content from all communities shows up on my feed, like most others’. Confused mods, possibly like you, seem to get angry when the see people regularly downvote content that they seem to be low-quality, even when those people are doing so without regard of the specific community.
If you don’t want to deal with downvotes in a community, you might be better off moving it to an instance that does not support downvotes.
A bit of selfresponsibility would help both sides tho - if you browse /all, you get /all, so instead of downvoting stuff you are not subscribed to and where you might be missing the context of the community, it would be best for you and the others to just filter the community instead of downvoting every single time.
Personally I factor this in with bans on my communities. I very rarely ban, but I do if I notice people like this, who I dub “downvote trolls”. They don’t participate (or when they do it’s negatively), the just downvote constantly.
Now I’m fine with downvotes, I downvote, I think it’s healthy to say “I don’t like this content”. However if all you do is downvote (especially in a specific community) then I view a ban as a win win. We don’t have to deal with your negativity and obviously you don’t enjoy being here anyway from your voting patterns, so everyone wins.
For my communities I have a pretty healthy ratio. If you downvote 80% of the content, you’re on my radar. I won’t ban you on that data alone, but seriously 4 out of 5 votes on the community are on average down then why are you there?
Personally, I agree (we would never do this in a large community for the record). But yes, there are people who think that they can “kill” a small community with downvotes because they don’t like the topic.
The sad thing is, it’s true. In a community where most posts have under 5 or so votes, one person coming in and systematically downvoting every post will keep people from seeing it who may be interested. If someone doesn’t like a topic, they can block the community, but when they take steps to prevent others from seeing it, that’s toxic. It’s bad for the health of the platform.
Content from all communities shows up on my feed, like most others’. Confused mods, possibly like you, seem to get angry when the see people regularly downvote content that they seem to be low-quality, even when those people are doing so without regard of the specific community.
If you don’t want to deal with downvotes in a community, you might be better off moving it to an instance that does not support downvotes.
This isn’t about drive-bys. This is about users who engage in bad faith. Take a look at OP’s pic again.
4650 downvotes.
19 upvotes.
That’s not happenstance.
Sure, but I felt that OC’s comment brushed up against a common issue of mods conflating the two.
A bit of selfresponsibility would help both sides tho - if you browse /all, you get /all, so instead of downvoting stuff you are not subscribed to and where you might be missing the context of the community, it would be best for you and the others to just filter the community instead of downvoting every single time.
I ignore stuff that’s simply irrelevant to me; I downvote slop and actual garbage in an attempt to help make everything better for everyone.