Ok, I get it: the majority of users on Lemmy are browsing by “all”, which puts a lot of content on their feeds that they are not interested in. I’ve already got in many arguments to try to explain this is kind of absurd and everyone would be better off if they went to curate the communities they are interested in. But I also understand that this feels a bit like saying “you are holding it wrong”.

But can we at least agree to a guideline to not downvote things in communities you are not an active participant, or at least a subscriber? Using downvotes to express “I don’t like this”, “I don’t care about this”, or “I disagree with this” is harmful to the overall system. It’s not just because you don’t like a particular topic that you should vote it down, because it makes it harder for the people that do care about it to find the post.

Downvotes should be used as a way for us to collective filter out “bad” content, but what constitutes “bad” content is dependent on the context and values of the community. If you are not part of the community in question, then you are just using up/down votes as a way to amplify/silence the voice of majority/minority. By downvoting in communities you don’t participate, you end up harming the potential of smaller communities to grow, and everyone’s feed gets dominated only by the popular/lowest-common-denominator type of content.

Instead of downvoting, a better set of guidelines would be:

  • If you don’t care about the post, leave it alone.
  • If you don’t want to see content from a specific community, just block it.
  • If the content is actual spam and/or not according to the rules of the community, report it.

Another thing: don’t forget that votes are public. Lemmy UI has a very handy feature for moderators that shows everyone who upvotes/downvotes any post or comment. I’m tired of posting content to different communities and be met of a pour of non-subscribers on the downvote side. Yeah, I think we should make some improvements in the software side to have a more flexible rule system for scoring downvotes, but until such a thing does not exist, I’m seriously considering creating a “Clueless Downvoters Wall of Shame” community to mention every user that I see downvoting without a strong reason for it.

  • Blaze@dormi.zoneEnglish
    23·
    9 months ago

    I usually see a lot of people downvoting posts in a language they don’t speak, presumably because they don’t care.

    I would suggest those people to select their languages in their settings so that they don’t see this kind of content.

    • CTDummy@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      Now that is just lazy, doesn’t even fix the problem when you could just filter it and never see that sub again.

    • CrayonRosary@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      The language settings do not work. Some hugely high percentage of comments and posts have an “undetermined” language because Lemmy doesn’t force you to choose a language when submitting something. And then there is federated content from programs that don’t even have a language setting.

      If you block “undetermined”, you block almost all content, and then there’s no point in even being here.

      What we might need is code to identify the language of a comment and assigning it automatically while allowing it to be changed if it makes a mistake. I imagine it would annoy multilingual people having to switch their configured language every time they make a comment, so just make it automatic by using a language model. That’s the kind of thing a language model would be really good at.

      Until we have something like that, the language settings are useless.

    • SnoopyEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      I confirm it, we have lot issue with it.

      On the software side, I think the language setting shouldn’t hidden in setting. I would move it in the filter bar along side “local, all, moderator view…”