TLDR: 3 people working together can gatekeep content on the “active” and “hot” feeds on smaller servers/communities.
After some playing around, I noticed posts disappear after reaching a threshold. A quick search later and I’m in the Lemmy docs reading about how this all works.
In plain English, any three people working together (or one person with three accounts) can stop posts from appearing on the default feed. Once a post reaches -2 it will only appear to people who browse “new.” Edit: Of course, it reappears after it climbs above -2, but it’s a race against the clock.
As a smaller server, we’re vulnerable to this. But we also have some extra mitigations - namely, @seahorse@midwest.social has to approve everyone who joins, and that might weed out bad actors.
So what can you do? Upvote content liberally, downvote sparingly.
I think getting rid of downvotes can also make social media more negative, since people feel the need to reply to things they don’t like instead of down voting and moving on. Of course, I now can’t find a source to back that claim, so take it with a grain of salt.
A comment is usually a lot more expressive than a downvote, adding valuable context to something other than just marking something as bad.
Source: personal experience. Usenet was a wretched hive of trolls and flame wars. I will gladly sacrifice a few unpopular takes if that’s what it takes to do away with that nonsense. And I can tell you, from experience, works. For every unpopular take at a score of -2 or so, there are probably ten more at -9000 that we can totally do without.
Yes, it means that people expressing an unpopular opinion have to be very careful with tone and phrasing. But they ought to be doing that anyway. Nobody ought to think they can just waltz into a community, say something that completely contradicts their raison d’etre without any attempt at respectful framing, and expect to be welcomed with open arms.
What I dislike about this is that people who might have something interesting to say or discuss would be discouraged from posting altogether because of the effort involved in carefully crafting their “tone and phrasing” . Like we could still have a report function so a moderator can identify and take down obviously inflammatory -9000-type posts, right? I think people tend to back into their shells when they see their post (which could very possibly already be well thought-out) downvoted to shit for no other reason than the ‘monkey-see monkey-do’ downvote behavior. In the long run, it seems like it leads to stagnation. I’ve seen it happen on some of my favorite subreddits as they get more popular and sadly echo chambered. Just my opinion tho.