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How are you doing with your communities?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Wondering if an option to opt a community out of downvotes outside subscribers would be a good idea.
I remember being on Mbin and seeing some poor baseball community I was browsing with things that looked to be factual and from credible sources having about 3 upvotes and downvotes to most posts, making it look like the content was fake or low-quality. I'm wondering how many of those votes were actual subscribed people (or people interested in lurking), and how many were just trolls downvoting anything they could—which happened to congregate in on a tiny community with not too many supporters to shout out the troll voices (like when a post has 50 upvotes and 1 downvote and zero negativity in the comments—you can probably guess the downvote is not for "off topic" or "low quality" or "spam" or "cruel," just a troll being a troll).
I do think the outside world's input is still valuable, but I do want to be able to protect small communities from having this happen to them, where every post looks like a shit contribution if you just check the votes even if the posts are good, because random people who downvote a topic because they just don't like that topic instead of blocking it from their feed or scrolling past, or actual trolls, got to it and there are not enough subscribers to drown the noise out.
Posting because I think some small communities I'm in have total outsiders downvoting posts to the point it outweighs subscriber upvotes: they are usually totally inoffensive, have no misinformation, and are on-topic for the community and on par with the usual effort it takes to make posts in that community, and yet almost even in upvotes/downvotes.