Ok, I get it: the majority of users on Lemmy are browsing by "all", which puts a lot of content on their feeds that they are not interested in. I've already got in many arguments to try to explain this is kind of absurd and everyone would be better off if they went to curate the communities they are interested in. But I also understand that this feels a bit like saying "you are holding it wrong".
But can we at least agree to a guideline to not downvote things in communities you are not an active participant, or at least a subscriber? Using downvotes to express "I don't like this", "I don't care about this", or "I disagree with this" is harmful to the overall system. It's not just because you don't like a particular topic that you should vote it down, because it makes it harder for the people that do care about it to find the post.
Downvotes should be used as a way for us to collective filter out "bad" content, but what constitutes "bad" content is dependent on the context and values of the community. If you are not part of the community in question, then you are just using up/down votes as a way to amplify/silence the voice of majority/minority. By downvoting in communities you don't participate, you end up harming the potential of smaller communities to grow, and everyone's feed gets dominated only by the popular/lowest-common-denominator type of content.
Instead of downvoting, a better set of guidelines would be:
- If you don't care about the post, leave it alone.
- If you don't want to see content from a specific community, just block it.
- If the content is actual spam and/or not according to the rules of the community, report it.
Another thing: don't forget that votes are public. Lemmy UI has a very handy feature for moderators that shows everyone who upvotes/downvotes any post or comment. I'm tired of posting content to different communities and be met of a pour of non-subscribers on the downvote side. Yeah, I think we should make some improvements in the software side to have a more flexible rule system for scoring downvotes, but until such a thing does not exist, I'm seriously considering creating a "Clueless Downvoters Wall of Shame" community to mention every user that I see downvoting without a strong reason for it.
On Reddit, where downvotes are anonymous, my niche sub (20k members but far fewer active) would continually get someone who would come in and downvote every single comment in an entire post. The time that it started and stopped was fairly obvious too b/c like in a Help & Questions megathread with literally 1000 comments, all of the replies would have a baseline value below the starting one (i.e., they would show 0 rather than 1), up until it stopped after which point they would all start at 1. That's a pretty clear indicator that they were subverting the rules of Reddit. As a moderator, I repeatedly complained to the Reddit admins, who did not seem to give a shit.
I even had screenshots of people on an associated discord server calling out for such brigading attempts. I offered them to the admins, who never took me up on that. It also happened in a much larger, I guess you could say parent sub of 200k members. Hundreds of thousands of people getting downvoted... b/c of one unhappy kid, or someone acting like it.
At least here in the Fediverse we have tools at our disposal that were not available on Reddit. e.g. if you were to block all of those people, I think they cannot vote against your future posts any more? Though it could also be due to a simple misunderstanding of how to use Fediverse tools. And for someone who made their own instance, you could literally adjust the rules - I would guess? - so as to only show the results of voting e.g. for accounts older than X days, or only by members of that community, or something. Though that would take significant effort, both up-front and then to stay in compliance with future Lemmy updates if it was not integrated into the main code, and it would only benefit members of your specific instance.
For someone who so rarely downvotes anything - I usually either just block a troll entirely or at least ignore someone who looks like they may be having a bad day yet feels the need to share that with the entire world - I might not be providing much perspective here! But I hope these thoughts at least were somewhat interesting.