this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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I run a few communities that I would consider to be fairly women-oriented, or at least I would expect them to be interested. I do not expect many men to be interested, and hey that's okay. I welcome anyone who wants to, but no harm if it's not your thing.
But any post that gets made gets downvoted to hell. I routinely have to moderate and remove posts of "Why is this here" and "This is stupid" even though there are people who enjoy it, they are just swarmed by other commenters, and it's made my members less active.
It's pretty clear how people vote and act here, I'm coming up on 2 years here and it's been like how you'd expect. Downvotes don't mean "I don't think this adds to the conversation" or "This is appropriate", they mean "I personally don't like this" here, and I think that kills a lot of our smaller communities.
Thanks for running those communities. I try to post to one of them where I can (I.e., make memes), but I’m not really a content creator. I just like to lurk in comments and respond when I feel like it’s worth me putting in my opinion or effort.
I’m aligned with your perspective. Hard to create or promote content when people downvote it due to hive mind. It’s discouraging and unwelcoming because it sends the signal “why is this here, you don’t belong in Lemmy”.
Thank you, Zoomies, that means a lot, honestly. I'm not one either, but I try to keep them going. I see the upvotes, people enjoy it, but I think many are a bit nervous to comment, but it'll grow eventually. I'm going to put some time on this over the next week to automate something I think
One thing I need to do is try to comment more. Hard to come up with stuff to say. And I’m one of those folks that types stuff, then second guesses it and backs out from posting.
I upvote what I can, but that’s always bare minimum effort. Consistent commenting is much more effort. And the extremely hard part is making original posts along with memes. I have no idea how Picard Maneuver does it. Bro carries Lemmy on his back alone lol.
I appreciate when you do, and I think others do too. One of the things I had to do was just stop caring about what other people thought. If they liked it, they'd upvote, or maybe they'd downvote, but no matter what you're adding to the conversation. I just dump out whatever I'm thinking now!
I do have to step up my meme game tho
Exactly why my instance has downvotes disabled
I deeply appreciate your decision to do that :3
Apparently mods can and do ban people who just downvote everything they see, there's even been posts here about it.
Perhaps this is the solution?
It is, I just wish it wasn't. I don't want to ban people for having negative opinions, but there are a lot of people who only downvote, and for them it's the only option. There also aren't tools to easily automate it.
I mean, if they only downvote, it's kind of a mercy ban. They weren't enjoying themselves anyways.
If it would really help, hit me up, I can write something to automate it.
Yes. The correct solution is to kick them out. Why are they even there if it isn't to participate? If the topic is inappropriate, make a report and let the mods handle it.
Drag's philosophy on content policing is this:
The mods choose the rules and remove content that breaks the rules. The users downvote and argue with content that disrupts the space without breaking the rules. If actions that disrupt the space without breaking the rules create a pattern, the mods create a new rule. The users decide if they agree with the new rule. If they don't, they create a new community and the two compete.
Downvotes are absolutely essential to this ecosystem. Platforms without downvotes, like Twitter, suffer for it. The algorithm can't tell the difference between hostile engagement and positive engagement, so comments that damage the space and provoke arguments are boosted as long as they don't break the rules badly enough for the admins to get involved. Some platforms try to solve this problem by having mods and admins do three times as much work to remove all the comments that would be downvoted. This causes mod fatigue and over-moderation.
Downvotes are a disagree button BUT your disagreement is public, and if your disagreements form a pattern, the moderators should be able to action it.
What Lemmy needs is better mod tools to show analytics on downvotes (technical problem; could be solved by any determined programmer), and better action on downvotes from the admins (social problem; requires the community to dump instances that don't moderate their users)
That's a good idea. Make a "irrelevant to me" button separate from downvotes by those who participate.
Which will in fact just be a combined "block user + hide post" action in the backend 😏
Better mod tools are a repeatedly requested feature. The question remains whether it's being ignored or it's difficult to implement and cover the entire fediverse.
My guess is a bit of a mixture of both - but it at least can't be a trivial thing to implement, or else it probably would already have been added to the project by someone, it's free software and open source after all.
Not necessarily. As free and open as it is, not everyone can add to it. There have been some caught, yet almost successful attempts to insert malicious code in open source software.
Also, the contributors might be passing on the torch thinking in the same way. And far as I remember, the original devs did a similar thing by letting others add in whatever.
So I'd say that until someone says they're specifically working on it, nobody actually is.
I've experienced this (though on a much smaller scale), Lemmy should have the option to disable downvotes for users not subscribed to a community, or at least not members of the instance
I really like the idea of having to be subscribed to a community in order to be able to vote. It would encourage people to use the correct tools (subscribe/block) if they like or don't like a community itself.
I would love this
Very disappointing to find out the real reason why women-oriented communities aren't exactly thriving here. But not surprising, I guess, although I was expecting better from a platform that seems so generally left wing. Can't even expect the men here to stomp that shit out. And now I'm waiting for someone to come and respond something along the lines of "not all men" while not addressing or confronting the issue or taking any steps to push for change.
Edit: aren't admins able to see who is downvoting? So basically the admins of your instance are just sitting back and allowing certain people to ruin things for others in communities that don't concern them?
I was devastated from the most recent US election as I learned a similarity between all political views is hating women. On another note, it's been 17 hours and I am immune to sarcasm; NoT aLL mEn
I can, but the problem is how do you sort out genuine downvoters from as you put them, the stompers? I've been working with a few other admins to have a more automated solution. Right now I have to go into the database and do queries about once a month to find trends
If it's a particular community being targeted, I'd probably start with people who aren't subscribed or don't contribute but camp out downvoting everything anyway. I mean, to me it sounds very much like this user's community is being blatantly targeted, so I'm not sure I understand why trends still need to be researched before anything can be done about it.
But I'm not an admin and I actually don't know what tools you have available to you. I was just under the impression that you could see when people who don't actually belong to a certain community go there just to downvote everything. Reddit managed to make people fear consequences for downvote brigading though, not sure how they pulled it off.
If this really is something that admins on various Lemmy instances are just too helpless to do anything about, then I apologise for directing my anger towards admins. And then I don't know what the solution is either because without any sort of assistance in the matter, women are just going to give up even trying to set up spaces here (actually seems like that's already happened for the most part). And so the culture will just never change.
From the UI, we get to see who downvoted a post, but nothing more than that unfortunately.
Trying to see who consistently downvoted posts, or who does who isn't subscribed is not available in the UI and requires going in the database and running scripts. Which I do, but it's a whole other later that I need to automate but haven't had time to do.
I'd be happy to write a bunch of sql for this type of thing and throw it on github if you have any more specific requests / if instance admins would find it helpful
Yes.
I feel like fucking rioting now lol. Hopefully one of these days there's enough of us here that see red over this shit to do exactly that.
Yet another nasty redditism inherited by Lemmy... and frankly that's why I think that we should have multiple types of downvote, this way people can express their disagreement in a fast and pseudo-anonymous way without fucking everything up.
It's just the internet, not necessarily a redditism.
And instead of a rainbow of downvoting options, just disable showing the vote counter.
This way, you can still downvote, but nobody sees the end result except maybe mods and admins for moderation purposes.
You can still use the upvote/downvote ratio to sort comments or posts in your feed, but it would be working under the hood instead of out in the open.
I like seeing it, this site has less value without it, why are you on lemmyworld when it has upvotes/downvotes? You have other options without them.
Also you can always hide them, most apps allow hiding them (that ive tried)
Kind of like slashdot modding of yore? I don’t recall if they still do it, but they had multiple positive and negative tags for moderation.
I think I understand why one of your communities is getting downvoted, it probably attracts some dedicated megas. I'll try to go in and upvote to counter act. I'm not a fan, but I'll try to help out.
Reddit used to have a rule that you couldn't downvote more than 3 or 4 posts in any community for a certain period. They went inactive while still showing as active. I think that might have been the beginning of fuzzy votes, but turned into so much more shittyness. It still might be a good solution for here. I still think mods should also be able to tag users as default, it's really hard to remember who was hateful yesterday and troll baiting, but acting all nice today.