Implement per community downvote restriction

[dayinjing]

Is your proposal related to a problem?

Some communities would like downvotes while others may not. Currently a admin user can disable downvotes site wide; however a moderator of a community does not have the fine tune control to disable downvotes for their specific community.

This becomes especially troubling when someone enables federation for a community on a server where nobody likes the content but the one person who enabled it.

Describe the solution you'd like

Allow admins, moderators to disable downvotes for a community when site wide downvotes are enabled

Describe alternatives you've considered

Give a admin/mod the ability to disable downvotes from foreign instance on their home instance while allowing them to show up on the foreign instance.

[dessalines]

The main issue here is brigades from other instances, and that doesn't only take the form of downvoting; it also can be creating comments, posts, upvoting certain comments / posts while downvoting others, etc.

To me only disabling downvotes doesn't really fix the root issue or its wider problems. The only real way to stop brigades from unfriendly instances, is to block those instances.

edit: I wouldn't necessarily be opposed if someone coded this, but they should know that its only fixing one of many symptoms of a larger problem.

[dayinjing]

The main issue here is brigades from other instances, and that doesn't only take the form of downvoting; it also can be creating comments, posts, upvoting certain comments / posts while downvoting others, etc.

To me only disabling downvotes doesn't really fix the root issue or its wider problems. The only real way to stop brigades from unfriendly instances, is to block those instances.

edit: I wouldn't necessarily be opposed if someone coded this, but they should know that its only fixing one of many symptoms of a larger problem.

These are great points but as instances grow larger it will get harder and harder to make that argument. Larger instances who post about another instance post will make it appear like brigading.

I think fine tune control of how other instances effect each other will make federation a over all better experience.

Maybe make this a epic. Allow instances to disable down votes from other instances, disable comments or post or both ect..

[webbongithub]

I want to run a community for people sharing images of a NSFW variety. Let's use a metaphor for this, I'm gonna try my best to respect the code of conduct.

Let's say there's a community for pineapple and pizza. People can post pineapple, people can post pizza, and people can post pineapple on pizza. Posters tag the images in such a way that people can easily not look at images they don't want to. Good quality images should be upvoted, regardless of the configuration of pineapple and pizza.

However, most people hate looking at pineapple on pizza. Some don't even want to see it show up on front page of the community. And so, instead of respecting that people have different tastes and co-existing, they try to downvote and bury pineapple pizza images. They do this regardless of the quality of the image. A lot of them probably aren't even thinking about it. The moderators can't account for this because they can't really see who is downvoting who. They can't kick people doing this out. Quality images that cater to the marginalised group of people who enjoy pineapple pizza are basically steamrolled by inconsiderate people. Even if other people might enjoy it! Even if it's a masterpiece in Canadian-Greek-American-Italian pastry photography!

When people upvote, they do it because they enjoyed the image. 100% of the time this means the user found it was of quality, or at least value.

If this community could disable downvotes, people who like pineapple on pizza wouldn't immediately hit -1. Rather, the score would reflect the amount of people who found value in the image. Sure, pineapple pizza might not be as popular, but if people want to see it they can easily find it. It will always float above images of other kinds people are indifferent to or don't like because there is an audience.

This kind of behaviour is common in communities I've moderated in the past. The only way to fix this is rigging the voting system and deanonymising votes, or disabling downvotes. I think the latter is a simpler, and easier to understand solution. Ignoring the NSFW subreddit, if you have a community that's supposed to be judgement-free for something like art, well, people can still anonymously judge others.

[UnderwhelmedExplorer]

I strongly agree with @webbongithub. To add, harassing downvotes (such as downvotes due to brigading users or users who downvote a community’s posts instead of blocking the community) can’t be removed by mods, unlike harassing posts or comments. I like the idea of allow/blocklisting downvotes on the instance level that was proposed in #4086, but this won’t help if harassing downvotes are coming from within the community’s instance or from another instance where downvotes are allowed. Certain communities might prefer to disable downvotes altogether if they’re concerned about harassing downvotes ruining their community. Although mods of these communities could create a new instance with downvotes disabled, they might not have the expertise, money, or capacity to do this.