That’s an orthogonal thing though. Downvotes and removals are generally triggered by different things, even if they intersect occasionally:
- “I think The Mandalorian is the best sci-fi western ever” is a reasonable thing to post in c/tv, c/scifi, c/westerns, etc.
- “I think The Mandalorian is the best sci-fi western ever” might be a reasonable thing in an open topic about comparing Firefly to other space westerns in c/firefly
- "I think The Mandalorian is the best sci-fi western ever" is clearly an off topic troll if posted as a top level reply to a question “Do you think Mal will ever find his true love” in c/firefly
In all three cases, it’s entirely possible the comment will get a lot of downvotes. But the fact it’s off-topic and, in context, intended to troll, that means the third case is the only one where you’d want it removed.
Indeed, it’s possible to envisage a highly upvoted comment that also ends up being removed because it’s off topic or an attempt to derail. Those are actually harder to remove, and I’ve seen (Reddit) moderators make the wrong call on them when they’re successful attempts to derail because they’re not always as obvious.
dope@lemm.ee 10 months ago
So it’s a matter of whether you like it or not. Which is reflected in your vote.
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 10 months ago
No. It doesn’t matter if, for example, one likes, let’s say Babylon 5… and posting bab5 memes to the star wars community. That’s not what that community is about, and should be taken down.
And this is ignoring the kind of things that are absolutely awful and never appropriate
dope@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Nonetheless, whether it’s an inappropriately placed post or a post extolling the virtues of racism, you will downvote it in exactly the same way. There is only one kind of downvoting.
ChlorineAddict@lemmy.world 10 months ago
To use a Reddit example, think of it this scenario:
Last I recall the most downvoted comment of all time was when a representative from EA said paying $80 to unlock Darth Vader in their recently released Battlefront game was to give players a sense of pride.
The fact the community was downvoting it with such fervor should have been important feedback to EA. If any platform were to blanket remove posts without review of an overly negative sentiment then EA wouldn’t have known they flew too close to the sun with greed on that comment.
I do think the idea of downvote removal is a valid one to clear out a lot of garbage, but it removes the community’s voice and could result in easy suppression mechanism of types of content or information by those gaming the system which is why I would vote no on auto-deletion, but maybe leaning yes on triggering review.
Though in that review there would have to be some guidelines from the mod team in the channel’s sidebar on what content would and wouldn’t be removed. Would a question people where people don’t agree with what is being proposed be deleted even though it’s not a stupid question? That could be an opportunity to learn more. Would a highly racist/sexist/etc question be removed? I’d vote yes, get rid of that troll.
One last thing on auto-remove: sometimes timezones have differing viewpoints. I clarified some terms that I’m an expert on and most newbies confuse, but I did it at a weird hour of the day for me. I was downvoted pretty heavily for the first 12h of my post, but then it recovered back to zero, then positive. Despite being a worldwide sport different regions have different definitions for the same labels. This is not something any of us in the community had realized until the follow up comments of people coming to my defense which led to a back and forth discovering both sides of the debate were regionally grouped. I still thing my region is right. But that mod review would have been dependent on the mod region, and we may have never gotten an answer, which is why my vote on auto-review is a maybe. I’d want to see a more fully flushed proposal before saying yes.