That’s fine and I’m saying that it is not a good idea to do so. I had figured my providing you with examples how intended voting behaviour can violate your proposed guideline would demonstrate that. Non English communities getting downvoted for… not being English is not intended or desired behaviour and deserves a more direct fix than a guideline.
No because that has nothing to do with why I downvoted the OP. Also, as I pointed out in an edit, my engagement with this post has likely driven it up in this specific instance anyway. Even if it doesn’t this went from being engaged by 2-3 people to a lot more real quick despite the OP largely neutral votes for the first hour, and now being -10 so clearly it doesn’t just drop the post off the face of the planet due to downvoting and probably other factors are considered.
Anyway, throughout this I’ve done my best to address every point you’ve brought up. Yet I’ve had multiple questions, some even asking for clarification, go ignored. So I think now is probably a good time for the old “agree to disagree”.
Alright and then this can be it for me as I’m pretty sure we won’t reach a consensus.
I would say the edge cases for this don’t justify the blanket guideline and if they did it could be worded (and likely similarly ignored) like reddit did. I would also say situations like the language one can be implement with a UI fix. Plenty of small communities both here and on reddit grew despite being “niche” or even just not popular.
No. You don’t seem to understand that you’re providing guidelines that are incompatible with voting. You want to talk about edge cases in which your guideline can function and makes sense. I’m providing you far more likely and apparent cases where it doesn’t. Your guideline means someone would be breaking them even if downvoting content that breaks the rules of conduct I.e using it directly as intended. I’d consider guidelines for not downvoting stuff solely because you don’t like it for “reasons” before your guideline. Which I’d argue being a lot of former redditors, Lemmy largely inherited.
The idea of even a guideline against shielding communities from negative engagement while affording all the benefits of positive engagement isn’t worth the odd niche community post being spared a couple downvotes from people who don’t know how to use it. If individual communities want to only display upvotes, then goes nuts since that makes way more sense. I doubt I was the first but I’d guess most votes are from people who share my numerous strong views on it. Anyway, as I alluded to before if you can’t understand my position after this many paragraphs then we probably better call it a day. Have a good one.