Ban them.

Lemmy is so young (and feeble) that users like those are an actual threat to your community and the larger network by driving away those who actually contribute to the community. In 2019, TrueBirch from Reddit analysed the data and concluded that only 1.9% of users actually comment or post while 98.1% just lurks. When your community is has a thousand or so users, it's entirely reasonable to protect those ~20 users who are creating content for the rest. In fact, the majority of the rest likely don't upvote things either.

You need to know why.

I went through days on Reddit where I would not find something posted that I wanted to upvote and found posts that, while maybe good for another community, were not fitting my definition of the intended topic. As a non-mod, you can't directly shape the content, but you can vote.

Like you said, they also might not understand that downvoting things from a particular community will not make it show up less.

Just ask them. If they're a jerk, you can still ban them. If they are ignorant but cool, you can help them be a better netizen.

My initial reaction when I read your posts was 100% support for banning them. They'd be better off blocking the community so it never shows up in their feed. But in the hours since, a counter argument occurred to me that I'd like to present.

Lemmy is, as many have said, still a relatively young and small platform. The range of content on it is limited not just by what subjects have communities, but what the individuals posting in those communities happen to be interested enough in to share.

A user might not want to block a community because they do like the subject of that community and want to read about it. But maybe only one user is actively posting content, and the subset of interest in the subject for user A just doesn't match the subset of user B. Naturally, they end up downvoting all the content at present. Where in a hypothetical that there were hundreds of active users posting in that community, the user would only downvoted a small fraction.

As a hypothetical, imagine I create a !classicalmusic community. I'm a big fan of classical music, especially Beethoven and the Romantics. I post a heap of discussion about Romantic theory, recordings of Beethoven Symphonies, Rachmaninoff Sonatas, etc. Because it's a small community, I'm the only one posting.

Then you come along, a huge Bach fan. You don't mind some Classical era stuff like Mozart and Haydn, but you can't stand the Romantic era. You downvote everything I post.

In my opinion, unless you want to get even more into the weeds and enforce the idea of "downvotes are only for off-topic and spam content, not for dislike" (which, I agree in theory is how the best users treat it, but let's be honest…it doesn't happen in practice), I don't think I should ban you.

Maybe I could send off a DM asking you to explain your downvotes, and I would ban you if you came back and said "I don't want to see classical music in my feed" (along with a recommendation that you use the block feature). And I'd try to encourage you to participate more in submitting the stuff you do want to see. But an attempt to figure things out some other way would be better than a ban, in that case.

I’m a serial voter (up and down), I have an opinion about practically everything. If anyone as a result gets a lot of down votes, they should perhaps create more content that I like? Just a suggestion.

I feel this could go several ways.

Troll who just wants to make people feel bad. Ban them.

Person who legitimately thinks content is low-quality, but likes the topic in general (perhaps no other Lemmy community exists for it?) and wants to see better posts. Leave it alone.

Drive-by voter checking in from Local or All (sorting by New makes even small communities visible, so "we're not big" isn't immune), maybe they legit think it's low effort, or hostile and toxic. Or they just see Thing They Don't Like and downvote instead of using the system properly—not quite the same as a troll purposely, maliciously ruining things but in my opinion not a great practice at all, but also not quite a bannable offense, unless they actively subscribe to a community full of things they do not like just to shit on it. And I am guessing right now intent is pretty hard to prove.

Because I can think of reasonable reasons to do this I would err on the side of not punishing a potential innocent. I'd wait at least until you see several extremely high-quality posts that are also inoffensive get downvoted. But I also get that downvoting everything in a community can be destructive. A big community can just shake it off, the upvotes will eventually outweigh the few downvotes. A small one will look like it has crap content if there is ~3 up/3 down to every post.

Also, check patterns outside your community too. Explicit stated intent to ruin community in a comment? Goodbye. Upvotes things outside the community? More chance to be a normal user who's probably got an innocent reason to downvote.

PTB. This thread is insane to me. If one person is downvoting posts, so fucking what? Just because they only downvote means their opinion is less valid? Maybe the content just sucks. If this is banworthy, then I might just be done with Lemmy already bc this is some petty bullshit.

I've encountered a few of those users, and personally I ban them.

My criteria:

1. They must be downvoting a majority of posts, where it's clear there is no real discrimination on quality (as then some posted close together would be spared)
2. I notice it happening across multiple communities/instances
3. I see the same name again and again, day after day
4. I never see that user upvote anything anywhere

I know there was one user who was mass downvoting to, according to them, mark posts as read.

I thought that was fairly ridulous, as why not just mass upvote instead to achieve the same effect? Wasn't sure I fully bought that, as they were dismissive when someone asked them to stop.

Lemmy is still small, and it seems unwise to allow mass downvoting to potentially discourage or limit the reach of people putting in the effort to help this place grow.

I've never had a downvoter message me to ask why they were banned or dispute it, so I figure they didn't even notice that they no longer saw the stuff that caused them to downvote in the first place.

It's situational.

By itself, down voting but not otherwise interacting is fine. Hell, one of the uses of votes is to let the sorting work, so down votes are a valid form of interaction.

But, some people abuse that. So, if the pattern of their voting shows that they're targeting a single user, or trying to manipulate the ranking to shift sorting artificially, or points to some other bad actorship, mod intercession would be a valid choice.

However, a ban would not be an acceptable first intervention. That would be overreach, going beyond the scale of the issue. Contacting the user first would be the appropriate step. Remember, lemmy is still small enough that we can at least try to treat each other like people instead of just words on a screen.

Let me use a personal example to illustrate why contact first is the better option.

There is a community, which I won't specify to avoid causing them grief, that is dietary based. Because of my background, I have a higher than usual grasp of the general subject, and have higher personal standards for health claims surrounding fad diets.

As such, when I would scroll past posts on that community that were factually incorrect, or didn't give supporting evidence outsider of a YouTube link, I would down vote it without any further action or interaction. Early on, the only posts were being made by the mod of the community, and they noticed that not only was I down voting almost everything on the C/, but that was all I was doing.

On the surface, that can look sketchy, right? Some rando just down voting with no observable pattern.

So, they contacted me. Asked what I was doing and why. I explained pretty much what I said here, and the conversation was pleasant. That started adding in text that gave more info than just linking to a video, which means that people scrolling by weren't just hit by what amounts to ads for a fad diet, which is a major problem that isn't really discussed much, but can have massive effects on people's health.

With the extra effort in place, the posts ceased to have that same quasi-subliminal effect where people just absorb it passively due to it being background noise. So, I no longer needed to down vote those posts, and ceased doing so; reserving down votes for posts that either weren't on topic for the C/, or contained things that amount to disinformation.

That interaction gave me a ton of respect for that mod, even though I still disagree with what their community "advertises" based on my knowledge out nutritional best practices. It also made me willing to check their linked videos on occasion to see if maybe my knowledge and current best practices should change to incorporate that diet as practical and healthy. So far, all I've seen is that it's less harmful than I thought, but that's going too far off topic.

Looping back to your specific quandry, I think that it's always worth trying to communicate. Lemmy really is a unique social experiment, and the best part about it is the people. As long as we all try to handle things person-first, we have a high chance at things staying more like a community than a disconnected bunch of user names that might as well be bots for all we care.

Now, being real, humans are assholes. So chances are that your attempt at communication will fail, and may fail with them being a giant, gaping, stinking asshole. But I think it's still best to make the attempt before moving on to other options.

If they're an asshole, then you ban them on grounds of community interference. If they aren't, then maybe something good comes out of it.

Bans like that are a valid and useful tool. Anyone saying otherwise doesn't understand what it takes to keep a forum running smoothly. But it has to be a scalpel, not an axe. It's way too easy to slip into being a power tripping bastard that ruins the very community you're trying to keep healthy. If you find yourself reaching for that ban hammer before trying other things, it's time to get some backup. Find someone to help take the load off, to spread the stresses of having to police a community and yourself.

It’s not considered powertripping as that is a form of vote manipulation.

If their only contribution is downvotes, then it's not really a PTB IMO and should be done.

Ask your community members, maybe?

I lean towards "go for it! block away" but I come from a different internet culture than reddit so could never mod anywhere similar. You might get better advice from someone who's spent more time in these spaces.

To me, It seems like chronic downvotes from nonmembers could mess up your comm's discovery. And is mildly annoying. Not terrible, but I don't think they need to be evil to get a community block. If you do it too much, your community might stagnate and people might start a new one. Oh well! Good luck to the new guys, imo. You might end up on PTB and get harassed. Always a risk as a mod, unfortunately.

Put "frequent exclusive downvotes from non-members gets a block to increase likelihood of community discovery by people interested in this content" on your profile. I mean, if you talk with your community members and they agree it's an issue.

If it's only downvotes, then a ban is justified.

Is it possible they're a bot?

~~It’s not possible to see unless you’re an admin or use some ActivityPub service that federates with Lemmy but doesn’t hide this information from the end user.~~

That is to say, I would if I could, if there was a malicious pattern. I didn’t understand the outrage that Reddit wanted to do that too (although their ruleset and ways of enforcement are not my cup of tea).

In the meantime, lead by example and refrain from downvoting unless for rule breaking content or offtopic so that toxicity doesn’t increase.

I'd say just ban them. Doesn't look like a healthy relationship for either side. Worst thing that can happen is they complain and you get to know the reason for their behaviour... And if they're under the impression it will get rid of the posts, banning them will accomplish that, so win-win.