After reading this post here I took a deep dive into the database and ran a few queries to see if I could use it to detect some basic manipulation such as brigading or other types of persistent hostile behavior.
I’d describe this as people who could have blocked a certain community but instead seemingly dedicate themselves to continuously downvote posts, maybe because they don’t like furry stuff in general.
Each line in the image corresponds to one person and how many times they have downvoted posts in a given community.
I won’t take any actions right now, this is all very experimental. I just wanted to share this with y’all to let you know that we admins have tools to give us clues about whether some sort of brigading is going on.
Interesting stuff. Personally, I’d urge people who don’t like furry stuff to just block a community and carry on. There’s nothing to be gained by obsessing yourself with stuff you don’t like.
It’s clear that lemmy still has some major work to do yet on this front. The fact that you have to visit the community first in order to block it seems like quite a flaw. And there is no way, to my knowledge, to deemphasize some content on the front-end without basically purging it completely. Not exactly ideal solutions for those that don’t want to be blasted by scat or gore, but also don’t want to live exclusively in their subscribed tab.
I think one thing that would help is an off by default. So all federations and all magazines except for some default feed off and you go to enable them as you want with the area always having an allow all and allow button. My hope is that the federation gets to that point at some point. I think the moment is there for this to become one of the massive gamechanges like gpl, linux, wikipedia, etc.