Right now I see mass-downvoting of content in groups, downvotes who seem to come from people who clearly aren’t apart of the group. This means, not only are they downvoting it from the public home-timeline, but they are downvoting content so that people within the group are less likely to see the content they have joined to see.
(I’m not getting into how the whole context of this and why or who’s downvoting for example me. Don’t need the drama)
But this makes so that people have to go into the group specifically to see content they want, or have to go far down into the sub timeline to find stuff after a day.
This makes the sub timeline pretty useless.
(I am also experiencing targeting downvoting on every post I’ve ever made. Functionally making my posts less visible on Lemmy regardless of what community)
Edit:
I’ve also found this in comments. Downvoting that only makes sense for people outside the group.
That is a good suggestion!
Although this will still be a problem for groups. It would mean that everyone using that group would have to do the same because the voting system is abused.
Admins that run their own Lemmy instance can choose to disable downvoting completely in the admin settings iirc I noticed last time I had a self-hosted instance. A great option by the developers imho.
Yeah that’s the solution that I’ve been using for a while and it’s been great.
It’d be nice if at some point instance admins or community mods were able to enforce their own sorting method and vote visibility. Or at least offer their own default.
@ajz@lemmy.ml (trying to answer both of you at once)
I feel like this doesn’t solve the problem though. The voting system is what gives Lemmy utillity as groups can filter through great content that makes groups useful for discovering things. If the alternative is just to disable voting it means the voting-system is busted which is unfortunate.
Taking away the downvote option then people still can upvote and the interesting content can still float on top of the front-pages but it will get rid of the silent downvotes from people who downvote whatever they like to downvote for whatever (silly?) reasons. And with self-hosting you are in the drivers seat ;)
Good idea
Votes mean almost nothing right now. The rate at which posts come in is far from fast enough that a single downvote will bury a post like would happen on Reddit. I feel like at most a post will move down maybe one rank or something. Plus, that’s only in the global pages, if every post in your community is being downvoted, it cancels out. We’re also thinking about ways to tweak the ranking algorithm so early downvotes are weighed less heavily.
It instantly moves down in comments though
Not necessarily. Soferman’s comment is at -1 while you’re at 2 as I type this, and his comment is above yours because it’s new enough compared to yours to outweigh the point ranking.
It has fallen
Okay! Will be interesting to see what will be done. But I feel the downvotes has a significant impact on my posts or other people’s posts. I’m also lucky to have people constantly vote me up too.