This is not a new issue, but we’ve had reports from some communities that they are experiencing a lot of repeated downvotes from the same set of people.
This is how it typically plays out, using AI images as an example:
- A section of the lemmy user base really hates anything AI generated.
- Instead of blocking AI generated image communities, they down vote those posts every time they see them.
- The posts in those communities effectively have to overcome a “handicap” of down votes each time they are posted. This harms community growth and discoverability.
The admin team would like to know how our community would like us to handle this issue, since it isn’t clear to us what is the best approach, and we would like a consensus view.
Some option for consideration:
- Encourage/allow community mods to ban persistent down voters from their community (note that we currently have no specific rule in place for this, so it is currently allowed).
- Pros: prevents future down votes; essentially “unsubscribes” from the community on their behalf
- Cons: could potentially be abused by mods who want to eliminate all down voters and “game” the system
- Have a policy of ignoring the persistent down voters
- Pros: allows people to continue to express their dislike of [insert topic]-type posts
- Cons: means that communities on topics that are not of interest to (or are actively disliked by) the majority of users will continue to be penalized in the lemmy post feeds.
- Leave it up to the discretion of the individual community mods
- Pros: self-determination and community based approach (i.e. only applied when needed)
- Cons: potentially inconsistent approach to down voters across the instance
Feel free to come up with more options, but these are the three main alternatives I could come up with.
We are interested to get your thoughts on the topic so we can come up with a policy for the instance. Please leave your comments below on your preferred option and the reasons for your choice.
Edit: apparently community mods can’t currently see the voting breakdown in Lemmy, only instance admins can, so this adds further complexity to the issue.
One person’s “slop” is another person’s favourite content, which is exactly the problem with “activist downvoting”. Those persistent down voters are effectively forcing their own personal feed preferences on everyone who uses Lemmy instead of simply blocking the communities they aren’t interested in. AFAIK it’s a problem with a lot of niche communities, not just with AI related communities.
But… that’s how voting literally works. Hence one of the smartest ideas I saw once for Lemmy (and for the Fediverse in general) was to substitute upvoting/downvoting for “voting on tags”, such as being able to tag a post as “fake news”, “inspiring” or “AI generated” and have people vote on those instead of on the psot / comment proper. Alas, I don’t know what ever happened to that proposal, and could never find it again to track it down.
But, see, that’s the thing and that’s why there’s an important difference between blocking and downvoting:
If I block something bad, like say fake news or fascism or AI, I block it only for me, it’s only protecting myself; but if I downvote it, I also help protect my peers. If we want to make community, that’s very important. And like any measure, it can be gamed, but so long as it’s the one option we have, we gotta use like that. I expect AI slop to be batch-downvoted; if I didn’t, I’d be back at Reddit.
This is a very paternalistic attitude imo. Your peers don’t need “protecting” from AI content any more than they need “protecting” from pornography, for example. Isn’t it preferable that they get to decide for themselves without you trying to sink those communities in the feed?
Ok, but if that’s your opinion then you should be fine with the same happening to “traditional” art communities. We should be allowed to brigade them in return, preventing them from showing up in feeds until they die off and move elsewhere.
Keep in mind that this is an AI friendly instance and those communities indeed are clearly marked and have the right to exist, your attempt to suppress them from others including their target audience would be viewed as hostile, and therefore it is fair and reasonable for their moderators and admins to ban you from the communities, and possibly even this site for the interference.
I understand you have feelings about AI as a concept, but try to understand how it looks to people who don’t, including those admins and moderators. Imagine if a person operated a community about Digital Audio and music on Digital formats, and someone who passionately hated Digital music as a concept and thought it was killing Analog downvoted their entire community as a group of Anti-Digital activists. Do you think their behavior would be seen as some kind of righteous activism, especially by the mods of those communities, or do you think it would be seen as an act of hostility to try and suppress a community that is clearly marked, and has the right to exist.
We can argue about the ethics of Corporate AI and AI in disinformation, however it is clear that communities like the stable diffusion art community and AI discussion communities are clearly marked and indeed have the right to exist. If you don’t like them you should block them and if your friends don’t like them either they should. Trying to suppress communities that have the right to exist and are not doing anything illegal or against policy because you dislike them isn’t something heroic, or viewed positively, it is considered an act of hostility against them, no different than the Vinyl guys brigading the Digital music communities in the analogy.
If you believe that these communities though violate your own instance’s policies, it would be suggested that you report them to your instance admins, either via the report system or sending a DM to them. Otherwise you should block them and let other people block them or ignore them as they choose.