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 @[email protected] and I started elsewhere, but it deserves it’s own space for meta-moderation discussion.
They would probably just create dummy communities to artificially increase their ratio.
Having a “cost” per downvote could be another idea. Like you get 5 downvotes per day (but then again, people would probably abuse alts)
It could be gated behind participating in a community before you can downvote in the community, then there is some metabalance for the community itself (i.e. sock puppets would have to post content that passes muster with the moderators to get credit to downvote)
My idea is requiring a user to have X amount of posts in a community before they can downvote posts in said community.
I’m not sure about posts. Comments maybe, but there are a lot of people who will only comment and never post, and that’s okay.
Yeah you’re right, should be comments rather than posts.