I’ve noticed a lot of posts lately that are just spam for slopware, often not even having anything to do with self-hosting. As sad as I am about it, I’m pretty close to unsubscribing to keep spam out of my Lemmy feeds.
Before doing so, though, I wanted to ask if there was any formal policy or rule for the community that could help cut down on thr spam, and if so, what would be most useful for me to do when I see a spam post? That I’d, is the Report button the right tool, is there some other way to let moderators know?
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Downvote and move on. Mute accounts and communities you don’t want to see. Curate your own feed. Simple as.
But what’s the point of downvoting on Lemmy? It doesn’t seem to affect visibility. Or maybe there’s a setting somewhere I need to adjust?
The point is signaling to other people that it’s not worth their time. I sort by new so I often see these slop posts as well, but other readers very quickly downvote it into oblivion so if a post is older than say 15 minutes I generally will know not to read it even if it sounds interesting at first glance. A mod will come by later to actually delete it if that’s warranted, but until then downvotes suffice.
Depending on your sorting method, downvoted posts will be featured less favorably in list views. You will immediately know that a heavily downvoted post is not worth your attention. Some clients might let you filter displayed posts based on vote counts or up/down ratio.
My instance has downvotes turned off (which I like). That action only benefits people who care about downvotes.
The better option that helps everyone is to report bad faith posts.
report bad faith posts
You’re supposed to report posts that break instance or community rules, not whatever you happen to consider to be “bad faith”. You can’t moderate based on intent, only actions, otherwise you’re asking for a thought police where only the popular opinion is permitted to exist.
Besides, even if your instance has disabled downvotes, other instances can still see them.
Before doing so, though, I wanted to ask if there was any formal policy or rule for the community that could help cut down on thr spam, and if so, what would be most useful for me to do when I see a spam post? That I’d, is the Report button the right tool, is there some other way to let moderators know?
Rule 7 as stated in the sidebar of this community: “No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.”
So yes. Use the report tool and downvote it to oblivion.
So yes. Use the report tool and downvote it to oblivion.
My instance doesn’t have downvotes, so reporting is the most effective remedy for everyone’s benefit
Sounds to me like the other effective remedy for you would be changing instances. Downvotes exist for a good reason and disabling them is harmful.
