A few days ago I made a post to gauge this community’s opinion on whether it should allow nice comics by bigoted artists. I think we have a consensus.
The majority of comments were very in support of banning comics by artists like Stonetoss and Jago. I heard from queer people who said they’d feel safer if the rules were changed. A lot of people were concerned about this community becoming a “Nazi bar”, the comment expressing that feeling got a LOT of upvotes.
The people against the change had two main arguments: anti-censorship, and personal responsibility. A few people equated active moderation practices with book burning. Nearly all of these “against” comments were downvoted or ratiod, and tended to have a lot of arguments underneath them, while the “pro” comments went uncontested.
On the internet, 10% of people will disagree with just about anything. With that in mind, I think we’ve reached a consensus. The community wants a rule change so that users can’t post inoffensive comics by bigoted artists.
That means no more Jago comics. I see a lot of people in the comments under the Jago posts, getting angry and saying they want this rule change. People aren’t happy with the user who’s posting all the Jago comics.
Mods, this is what we want. Please change the rules and get Jago’s comics outta here.
The problem is that downvotes do not work. They do not function as an incentive for these users to stop posting, because they do not matter at all.
It can work on larger platforms, where thousands, or even tens of thousands of people vote. There the users form roles based on how they sort the posts. People who sort by New are well aware that they are going to have to sift through a lot of trash, but their reward is that they get to have a more active role in setting the taste for the entire community. Because then you have people who sort by Hot or Active, which tends to be the majority of users in most communities (and is often the default). So in communities with dozens of posts, hundreds of comments, and thousands of votes every day, the things the community doesn’t like gets buried.
The Fediverse is too small for that system to work. There simply is not enough posts, comments, and votes to make any of that meaningful. The same users can just spam the same authors over and over again, and it doesn’t matter whether the post gets 100 upvotes or 100 dpwnvotes- the whole community is going to see it in their feed regardless. And it’s not as if having negative "karma"really matters.
One of tbr systems Reddit had to combat this was that karma occasionally mattered. Some subreddits would require karma to join, or ban if your karma dropped. I’m not sure if the tools exist for something like that here or not. There are a lot of different t ways you can slice up the numbers, but basically looking at post history, ratios of up/down votes, total down votes, etc. Effectively letting community feedback drive the moderation process.
That’s still not perfect because users can block/mute other users. Doing so would effectively be abstaining from voting, and that’s not the healthiest system. But we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good.