Is it a PTB move (!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com) to ban a user if their only activity in a community is downvoting posts?

The behaviour baffles me a bit. If they dislike the majority of the posts in a community, why are they subscribed? Or if they are browsing by /all, why have they not blocked the community? Are they under the mistaken impression that Lemmy has an algorithm which uses downvotes as an indicator for “show me less of this”?

Has anyone else encountered a “serial downvoter” in any of their communities?

  • jherazob@fedia.io
    10·
    9 days ago

    I’ve heard this described as “the 1% Rule”, which more or less goes like: In online communities, 1% of the users generate 90% of the content, 9% of the users create 10% of the content by reacting to, modifying or generally interacting with that 1%, and the other 90% of people are lurkers. This fits quite well with what I’ve seen on online communities myself for decades. So, if you alienate that 1%, your community will eventually either disappear or become a hollow reflection of what it used to be.

    • Bora M. Alper@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      9 days ago

      Absolutely, and it’s already pretty hard to bootstrap a community organically† to so you should not hesitate to do what’s necessary to keep it healthy as small communities cannot moderate themselves easily.

      † From How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts:

      Well, according to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it ‘til they made it. In the above video for Udacity, an online source for education and lectures, Huffman describes how the first Redditors populated the site’s content with tons of fake accounts.