this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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politics
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Yes, but when there's literally thousands of posts and comments to build the "between the lines" data within a 30-day time frame what excuse is there?
When somebody is trolling so hard that it's causing strife within your community it should be addressed. Identify the behavior that isn't desired and enforce existing rules around it or create a new one and warn the person that they need to operate in good faith within the rules or they will be ousted as an antagonistic troll.
In cases like that the default position is to allow the downvotes and individual user blocks to do the job.
I think that would carry more weight if downvotes had some kind of meaningful effect on the user's engagement with the platform. As it stands they're purely symbolic.
Additionally, deferring to user blocks does two things: 1) It decreases the chance that the problematic behavior will elicit meaningful criticism or pushback from more engaged participants, which amplifies its unchallenged visibility/effect on marginally engaged lurkers, and 2) it puts control of the dialogue squarely into the hands of committed trolls, rather than the community or the community's moderators. Blocks don't do anything to change or improve the community, they just allow people to filter their own version of it.
Pyfedi / piefed.social has a take on this that you might find interesting.
For example, pyfedi allows for anonymous voting, but I believe there's a planned change (if it isn't already implemented and live) so that folks with a low reputation (from too many downvotes) can't use it. By default, comments and posts with too low a reputation are also hidden. This is handled automatically by the software, so no human moderator or admin has to do anything - if enough people downvote, the system enforces the consequences automatically.
That sounds promising. I think Lemmy is young enough that we don't have simple functionality like modmail or karma-type troll throttling, but I'm optimistic that we'll start having improved tools very soon. Thanks for the heads up!