Only allow downvotes from community followers

[AgentScrubbles]

Requirements

• Is this a feature request? For questions or discussions use https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support
• Did you check to see if this issue already exists?
• Is this only a feature request? Do not put multiple feature requests in one issue.
• Is this a backend issue? Use the lemmy-ui repo for UI / frontend issues.
• Do you agree to follow the rules in our Code of Conduct?

Is your proposal related to a problem?

Niche communities are suffering on Lemmy due to users who are not interested in the content browsing All seeing a post and immediately downvoting it. This is causing frustration with users inside of the niche community because they never get to see the content, or their community's posts always have zero or negative points due to those outside of the community. This is hurting our niche communities and causing less engagement.

For example, a sewing/embroiderment community would indeed be small, but would have a core following of users. However, the vast majority of users on All probably do not find sewing/embroiderment interesting, and downvote immediately, thus the posts never receive attention. This causes frustration with users interested in the community because they only see low rating posts, and are hesitant to join.

Describe the solution you'd like.

I propose that we have a new option for communities that only allows downvoting from subscribed members. This would still allow downvoting from subscriberes, which helps cut down on bad or irrelevant posts, but makes sure that posts are rated by their members themselves. Upvotes I believe should still be allowed from everyone, as that enhances Lemmy and encourages engagement, but for niche communities this could help them foster a more productive space for themselves.

All users of course can still comment on posts and engage, but they won't hurt the overall community by having every post downvoted to oblivion.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

I've also considered banning users from the communities who frequently downvote, aka downvote trolling, but this isn't a long term solution, and it doesn't solve the issue of the community just may be very niche. It's also a very heavy-handed approach and comes off as over-moderation when really we just want to foster a smaller community.

Not federating downvotes to the community could also be considered, but then that just hides the issue on other instances. I think this needs to be community driven, and less instance overrideable (like downvote federating). This is because if viewing a smaller niche community hosted on instanceA, if instanceB is much much larger and doesn't listen/care about this setting it will be irrelevant for all of users on instanceB as they will just see the community with <0 score, and thus not fixing the underlying problem. Personally I think the downvote button could just be hidden or give a tooltip that says "You must be subscribed to this community to downvote it". People then are also welcome to hide the niche community if they never want to see it again.

Additional context

I am aware that we can disable downvotes instance-wide, but I don't believe it would solve this problem. There are valid reasons to have downvotes, the community may have a post that does not fit or people disagree with, but those in the community are best fit to decide that. (Albeit it opens the door for vast upvoting with only a few able to downvote, but we can cross that bridge later)

[M4rtineski]

I've been noticing a similar issue with downvotes on niche stuff and posters being consufed for the longest time. It's really frustrating to see because I want to see more things other than politics and memes on threadiverse (was that how we called aggregators together here?) and the random users using c/all and downvoting discourage that.

There are also topics like lgbt where the downvotes tend to be collected as well and I don't think it's a good idea to be stuck with blahaj as the only option when creating such a community. There should be a way to allow the community more fredom on how it could operate without it being completely tied to the instance. I also believe that the instance admins should be allowed to disable the feature if they don't want such thong on their instance.

Alternatively (or even on top of this feature) the option to hide the communitiy from showing on c/all could also work at the cost of making the discovery a bit harder.

E: I also believe that if the post does something wrong then it should be pointed out in the comments instead of using something abstract like a downvote which could mean leterally anything depending on the context. If the community or the user does something wrong then it should be reported to admins instead and let them handle that.

[AgentScrubbles]

I like the suggestion of hiding from all, but as a separate option to preventing outsider downvotes. I've waffled with that idea, mostly because I do want people to discover us naturally, but I want to encourage engagement, not discourage.

[M4rtineski]

Yes, I meant it as a separate (or additional) option in case your suggestion was something the devs would be against. It would obviosuly be solving a different type of a problem and creating some others like discoverability but it sounds simpler to implement so it would be something at least. I still strongly prefer your suggestion though because there are no drawbacks in visibility. Mine is more of a losing out on visibility in favor of less downvotes/comments from people browsing c/all where they just want content and not engage positively while still allowing downvotes from people. I just think it would be good to give moderators more options on how they could steer the community.

[Nutomic]

I think this is a good idea because there are definitely too many memes and political posts on Lemmy. However the next version 0.20 will already include new site settings for downvotes, so that you can separately disable downvotes for posts or comments, or only accept downvotes from local users. I believe a setting of disallowing post downvotes and only allowing comment downvotes from local users would be enough to solve this problem. Note that this is currently only implemented as an instance setting, not for communities.

[M4rtineski]

Personally I wouldn't want it to be restricted to local but to subscribers of the community to allow the members of the community from other instances to give feedback this way while limiting the outside influence.

Another important point there is it being a community setting to allow the mods/users to choose what's the best for community instead of it being instance wide and limiting the choice of the users. What I would be for is an instance setting to disable the feature/s suggested in this issue to let the admins decide what's the best for their instance.

So far three features have been mentioned in this issue and each of them is valid but solves a different kind of a problem where one can't replace the other but I still believe that having those choices would be important.

[AgentScrubbles]

I think this is a good idea because there are definitely too many memes and political posts on Lemmy. However the next version 0.20 will already include new site settings for downvotes, so that you can separately disable downvotes for posts or comments, or only accept downvotes from local users. I believe a setting of disallowing post downvotes and only allowing comment downvotes from local users would be enough to solve this problem. Note that this is currently only implemented as an instance setting, not for communities.

Unfortunately this would not work for me, where I have only 3 or 4 local users, but hundreds of subscribers across the fediverse. For me if I only allowed downvoted from local users, it pretty much silences the vast majority of my community, and I believe downvoted do have a use. I understand what problems your solution would solve, but unfortunately I don't believe it would solve my issue.

[dessalines]

This is a dupe of #4086, where we discussed this already, and came to the compromise of blocking votes based on content type, and federation status (local / federated)

The proposal of only allowing specific types of votes from subscribers wouldn't work, because public communities have no vetting, and it takes only a second for federated users to subscribe, and downvote anything they want to.

The better solution would be to have blocklists for specific servers, since most of the federated troll downvotes come from a few specific servers. But that would require more work than we have time for right now.

[Nutomic]

The better solution would be to have blocklists for specific servers, since most of the federated troll downvotes come from a few specific servers. But that would require more work than we have time for right now.

This will be possible with plugins

https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/8/files

[Nutomic]

#5478 adds a new community visibility Hidden which will be federated. With that setting the community will not be shown in local or all feeds unless the user is already subscribed. So that should solve the problem described here.

[Die4Ever]

PieFed has this feature and it's good. Most people browsing All won't bother to subscribe, downvote, and then unsubscribe just because they were uninterested in a post. People are lazy and a bunch of extra clicks is a huge deterrent (we know this because we tried to get more people to signup for the Fediverse lol).

https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-user-community

in the "Downvote mode" section

Another option would be to silently reject the downvote so the user isn't aware.

This discussion made me look for this issue and I was sad to see it was closed not completed https://retrolemmy.com/post/39732699

[dessalines]

Check out #5038 , and specifically this comment. Lemmy now has VoteOptions separated by post, comment, up, and downvotes, with the ability to allow votes based on federation status.