I came here from hot as well. Lemmy gives priority to posts from small communities to try to help them grow, or at least I’ve read comments claiming such.

A problem with this is narrow-minded users who downvote posts from small communities “because I don’t like it/want to see this content.” But that is a narrow-minded, infantile approach which just screws up the functioning and growth of communities.

I hate seeing all the lame ass memes and cringeworthy anime thirst posts, but I block the communities rather than downvote the posts.

Just because I am not interested in a community, it doesn’t mean that I should fuck up the functionality of appropriate/relevant content for the given community by downvoting.

I’ve had this happen with my posts in [email protected], where I can tell that the people downvoting some posts were from outside the community.

It’s a widespread problem that is the direct result of unhealthy users who don’t understand the function of downvotes, and think it’s a disagreement/dislike button, when it’s actually meant for hate, trolls, irrelevant content, and misinformation.

The same morons who downvote appropriate community posts for communities they don’t like upvote irrelevant content for communities they do like. They’re the users that helped contribute to so many reddit communities becoming homogeneous meme/circle-jerking subs.

People like to think that all the toxic/unhealthy users stayed on reddit, but enough of the least common denominator came over to continue misusing down/upvotes and screwing up the functionality of this site and hinder the growth of communities.