There are entire communities full of bad faith actors, spammers, and echo-chamber-enforcing mods. We as individual users downvote them with 0 effect. We can block and hide users/communities/instances but that does nothing for the community as a whole. Ignoring them and “not feeding the trolls” is simply not making them go away. Just try blocking UniversalMonk, we all know they have dozens of accounts with hundreds of downvotes across every comment and post and yet they keep going. Or any of the conservative communities who’s total post score is in the red.
I’ve blocked so much garbage that my feed doesn’t change very often. I barely check Lemmy once a day now. This does not make for a healthy online community.
Many of us came from reddit where there are many valid complaints for how they run things but one thing I’d like to see return is downvotes slowing down how often a user can post, comment, and vote in a community. If a single user’s score drops too low within an instance or community, that user should be rate limited or maybe even auto-banned or maybe an entire third option I can’t think of. But right now it’s not even a slap on the wrist.
Score is relative though. On hexbear we have downvotes disabled. This means we can not down vote but also means down votes do not federate.
Studies have shown that down votes actually have a large psychological impact negatively on the user. Down votes are frankly unproductive. They might also encourage bad behavior, because if your goal is to stir the pot then down votes are a great indicator that it’s working.
On hexbear we operate on a fork of Lemmy. One of the changes is to the active algorithm, which makes posts decay faster then core Lemmy. Since the change things move pretty smoothly on the front page.
An automated system of banning is something primed for abuse. We see this already on other platforms that has trigger mechanisms for banning a user pending review. Its a shoot first ask questions later approach that could be weaponized against people.
Echo chamber is a very loaded term. A safe community is a protected community. To someone intruding on a space that values the community it has built, it might look like bad faith action. However, often the inverse is true, and the intruder is the one acting in bad faith. That could mean they willingly or ignorantly disregard the rules of a space, or are unwilling to listen and understand the perspective of a given space, and simply want to argue.
The value in Lemmy is that you can build and curate the kind of site culture and ultimately network culture you desire. If you do not like that culture, you can anyways find another place to hang out.
As it stands, you can implement your ideas using a bot. One thing definitely lacking on Lemmy is a kind of Auto moderator. It should be remembered though that auto moderator was a community built tool until Reddit assimilated it into the site as a core feature.
Yep!!! :)