Hi everyone,

I’ve been observing a concerning trend on Tucson.social that’s prompting me to consider disabling downvotes. It seems many community-focused posts, particularly ones from the city government about Tucson’s development, are being downvoted mainly by users who aren’t local—over 95%, to be specific. I believe this often isn’t nefarious; rather, it’s likely the unintended consequence of users browsing their “All” feed and downvoting content that isn’t relevant to them. This behavior inadvertently suppresses our most locally impactful content in favor of more broadly appealing posts.

Originally, I maintained the downvote feature because I see dissent as crucial, especially for a platform aiming to mirror our real-life community. However, the majority of our interactions come from users across the wider fediverse, many of whom likely don’t reside in Tucson or even Arizona. This distorts our goal of having the site reflect the community it serves.

We’ve taken steps to ensure that our users are indeed located in Arizona, although these measures aren’t perfect. They hopefully help to ensure a more authentic user base.

Considering our commitment to fairness and open dialogue, defederating or blocking individuals isn’t a viable option. Thus, I propose we temporarily disable downvotes until our user base grows. This adjustment will encourage users to engage more constructively through comments or by choosing not to interact with content they disagree with.

This change will not affect other instances; they can still downvote and show downvote totals for posts from our community, just as we can currently downvote posts from Beehaw.

I believe this stop-gap measure will help us better prioritize our local members’ voices as our user base expands. It’s the most practical solution for now.

As always, such a change needs your input. Are there other solutions I might not have considered? Or do you think this is a mistake? Your feedback is invaluable.

Looking forward to your feedback,

[email protected]

Footnote: Our instance was impacted by the ‘Bot wave’ shortly after the initial Reddit-to-Lemmy migration following the third-party app debacle. This wave was much more severe for other instances which suffered thousands of bot sign-ups due to their lack of email validation. Thanks to our foresight, prompt action, and decades of experience in DDoS mitigation, we were able to limit the damage to about 40 ‘stub’ users when the dust settled. These ‘stub’ accounts still exist and contribute to our user count - but have otherwise been permanently disabled.