If a niche community has people that persistently downvote every post
- is that healthy for the community?
- is that healthy for lemmy in general?
Examples that come to mind are political communities, linus tech tips, diet communities, etc. There will be a group of people who will not make comments, posts, but will strictly downvote everything that is in the community.
This is a continuation of a discussion @Blaze@feddit.org and I started elsewhere, but it deserves it’s own space for meta-moderation discussion.
Yeah, I’m talking more people who just spam downvotes than anything. There’s definitely an ego angle on the mod side, for sure, but in my own case I let the script and its thresholds take care of that and just review later.
In the case of my script, it also accounts for upvotes (and the overall up/down ratio and number of submissions for them in the community) as well as the account’s age. I don’t want to publish the thresholds to avoid people gaming them, but I’ve got it pretty well tuned to avoid all but the weirdest false positives. It’s not perfect (tends to err on the side of caution), but at least it’s fair and removes ego/emotion from the mix.