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.
Sorry but the assumption that people using Lemmy RSS feeds are just lurking and not actively participating comes off as a little naive.
In fact, the whole post makes a lot of assumptions that I dont think are accurate, which makes it difficult to wrap my head around whether a solution is necessary or if this is really a problem to begin with.
Ok, let's talk about it then: I've noticed that almost every post that I make on any smaller communities that I'm trying to bootstrap is met with 2-3 downvotes after a few minutes.
Why is this happening?
So, the "lots of assumptions I'm making" can be summed up as: posts are getting downvoted by (a) non-subscribers (b) who browse by all and (c) think that downvoting is going to help with curating their feed.
It's not the end of the world, and it's not a hugely complex problem. I was just hoping to get people aware that this "downvoting anything that is not interesting to me" behavior is learned from Reddit (and other Social media sites) and do not translate as well to a place that is so much smaller and has no filter bubble.
I'm not surprised that so many people are acting like I called their baby ugly or something. I know that most people take this learned behavior as the "natural way" of doing things, so I was expecting some pushback. I'm just finding a bit ironic that so many people did nothing but pile on my comments and downvote everything without any further thought.