I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:
Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn't a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have... But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let's look at the number of bans per community hosted:
Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.
I think you're making an easy mistake to make. You see an account with no comments and assume it was created by some shadow organisation just to downvote things. But what you need to understand is, 99% of users on any social media are lurkers. 90% of people just browse. 9% of people browse and vote. 0.9% of people browse, vote, and comment. And 0.1% of people actually make regular posts. So 9/10 people who downvote your posts, just organically, are people who never comment. Because that's how social media works.
Rimu's Piefed moderation tools can help somewhat. Rimu put in an "attitude" score that shows how often a user up/downvotes. But even that can mess up. When I told one friend about piefed's attitude feature, She said "But I only vote when a post is actually breaking the rules. So I can be punished for voting? Okay, then I just won't even vote on piefed". That's the truth about this stuff: There are billions of people out there using social media in a way you will never be able to relate to. Because everyone is different.
yeah that's exactly why i don't think the attitude score helps
Nah, I'm aware of how many lurkers there are. I'm not assuming that the accounts were created by some shadow organization or something.
But from the perspective of people who are actually getting downvoted, it just feels bad.
I get it. But in cases like that, I think it'd be fair to argue that people are using social media in a counterproductive manner. Like for those who only downvote and never upvote, I question that behavior. All of those posts and comments that you enjoy don't just come out of nowhere, people are actually putting time and effort to create them. And the only reward they get is upvotes.
Furthermore, upvoting is the way that you push quality content to the top, so that other users will notice the better content instead of missing it. It's a critical part of what makes the whole community work. So if you systematically ignore the upvote button, you're not being a responsible user of social media, you're more of a leech that contributes very little and takes the contributions of others for granted.
And I don't blame people like that at all, because traditional sites like reddit are so oversaturated with content, much of which is made by bots as well. So in that context, upvoting doesn't matter nearly as much. So I think people simply don't understand that even as a lurker, your upvotes and downvotes have consequences. It may seem insignificant for one person, but on the scale of thousands of lurkers, in the context of a relatively small userbase like we have here, it becomes clear that they are playing an active role in shaping the direction of the platform as well, despite not saying a single word. I only came to understand this after spending time on Lemmy, so I don't expect people to just instinctively understand it. Which is why it's important to educate them.