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 that this is kind absurd and that the 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 “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? 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.

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.

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.

Can we agree that we should stop using downvotes to express “I don’t like this”, “I don’t care about this”, or “I disagree with this”?

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 that upvotes/downvotes any post or comment. I’m tired of posting content to different communities and a pour of non-subscribers on the downvote side. Yeah, I think we could 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 and I’m seriously considering creating a “Clueless Downvotes Wall of Shame” to mention every user that I see downvoting without a strong reason for it.