Skavau

Disagree. If I run a metal music community, and someone who doesn’t like metal continually goes in there and downvotes everything because, well, they don’t like metal music. What use are they to it? Why wouldn’t I ban them? All they’re doing is hurting the visibility of the community. This is the context in which I would ban downvoters from my community. Serial mass downvoting by people who never otherwise engage with the community, don’t like the topic of the community, and in some cases - the accounts have zero comment history and purely exist to downvote.

I think this is quite different to just ‘wanting an echo-chamber’.

No, I said I haven’t seen 12 downvotes in 5 minutes. I accept for extreme cases it might happen, but for ordinary topical posting in the relevant communities? Never seen it.

Also, I didn’t say anything about restricting it.

But there’s also a large difference between 5 minutes and 24 hours time-wise.

12 downvotes in 5 minutes on ostensibly ‘neutral’ or non-controversial topics are way dodgier to me than 50 in 24 hours. I have never seen downvoting at such a rate anyway.

Yes.

Up to community owners. You can already filter by /new/ now.

That would mean there’s zero quality control and larger communities new posts would flood out older posts. No-one supports this idea.

How would they organise it?

I post a lot on a pretty busy community for lemmy standards and have never seen 12 downvotes in such a short time. Or any number close.

Also I am not sure how 50 downvotes over a day is more sus to you than 12 in 5 minutes.

Only deliberately antagonistic types of posts collect that amount of downvotes that quickly on lemmy in my experience tbh.

That is not normal for innocuous posting

Yeah, I mean I wouldn’t call it “manipulation”. Just vandalism in this case.

Its only really problematic on smaller instances or if you do it continuously for every single post without a good valid reason

And that’s closer to what I am referring to. If someone just hates movies or TV and doesn’t want to see it on their feed, they should block it rather than downvote every post from movies and television communities. They aren’t somehow mitigating an echo chamber by signifying how they hate movies and TV content. They’re just vandalising it.

Depends on the time between the downvotes. Believe it or not there are accounts that exist that exist purely to downvote. They do nothing else.

In this case I’m referring to the hypothetical of a single account, consistently downvoting almost every post on a community with zero interaction history. And they keep doing it.

I can’t speak for whatever you’ve done or been accused of, but those accounts do exist and it’s completely justifiable that some community owners ban them.

You mean “dozens of downvotes” specifically directed at a single community?

And how would content be organised and curated?

It’s incredibly helpful and helps cultivate a high-trust culture. On Reddit, many posts get swarmed with downvotes right off the bat, no matter what they are, due to voting anonymity.

It depends. If there’s certain types of content you don’t like that a community mostly deals in, you downvoting it effectively means you’re downvoting almost everything on there - and at that point, it’s just little more than a very crude attempt at community vandalism.

I should also add that 2 or the accounts I banned literally had no post or comment history despite being active for years. Their only purpose was to downvote.

I just said to another here in this thread: Downvotes hurt visibility. Downvote trolls can be a problem for small communities trying to build up. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. Now, I wouldn’t just downvote randoms for occasional downvotes - but if I kept seeing the same names on threads (and they never actually engaged with the community) with no discernable patterns - I might.

Made a huge difference.

Not related to the OP here, but downvote trolls can be a problem for small communities trying to build up. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. Now, I wouldn’t just ban randoms for occasional downvotes - but if I kept seeing the same names on threads (and they never actually engaged with the community) with no discernable patterns - I might.

Made a huge difference.