Sorry to be unclear though: I did not mean that I ignore those users but that I choose to ignore those labels on the users. They aren’t ready to be used to ignore people yet - if ever that day may come.

If it helps to go deeper: imagine the following scenario. A moderator is tasked by a community to uphold certain standards, like let’s say it’s an “art” community and some people very much dislike AI, while others like AI. Having a label (e.g. PieFed allows people to place “hashtags” onto posts - Mbin can do this too but I forget if that’s just when federating with Mastodon or if it can also do it for Lemmy as well) allows the people who strongly dislike AI to not have to receive such. By placing the decision away from the moderator into the hands of the individual users to set up their block lists, this represents a “democratization of moderation”. Power to the people! Why would that be bad?

An example I more commonly use is porn: should it be removed, or allowed? Moderators can only do either one or the other - never both. Whereas if there is a label, rigidly applied, the end-user can switch it on or off at will, even while at work without fear of losing their jobs.

But back to the democratization issue: the idea is that “moderation” is an authoritarian-style concept, where the Power (like shit) flows downhill. In contrast, allowing the voters to carry the day is democracy in action.

And as such, it can be abused - e.g. if people could create 1000 accounts, and thereby have 1000x the voting power of a common singular person, or even just 2-5 accounts and thereby have 2-5 the power of 1. All the benefits, and all the detractions too, of democracy, applied to Lemmy.

But we can also have the best of both worlds: moderation and user-defined thresholds to show vs. not show certain content. If I want to see more contenious content, I can relax the thresholds, or even get rid of them entirely (as I actually have done), but if someone else chooses to curate their view more tightly, then why would I judge them?

One potential reason for the latter is when people duplicate content, b/c they don’t see each other’s. Thus, the “label” concept shows through even more clearly there: what if instead of “showing” vs. “not showing” content, we could have a whole entire spectrum like “here’s content we think you’ll REALLY like”, “here’s some other content that, fair warning, you’ve not much enjoyed in the past”, and also “here’s other content that, whoops no you aren’t allowed to even see this b/c it’s gone at the moderator’s behest”. Since 3 > 2, and choice > no choice, hence isn’t labeling “better”?

I honestly do not know. But it’s a grand experiment to find out, nonetheless!:-)

The scenario you described though, might just need a schism to form 2 separate (sub-?) communities. Btw, not to toot its horn too awfully loudly, but PieFed also has “categories of communities”, so that if they both were placed into the same overall Category, people wouldn’t even have to so much notice precisely which Community the content was in, except when posting. And side-note: that also dramatically speeds up the onboarding of a new account: you can simply subscribe to “Memes” for instance, rather than each community individually, although you can always leave individual ones - such as memes@lemmy.ml, for political extremism - at anytime later, or subscribe to new ones.

And ask for commenting rather than merely voting: that much I agree - and at that point, why bother with the downvote even? Also, if a conversation should be happening, then shouldn’t it rather be UP-voted, for relevance rather than “I (dis-)like this”?

Which reveals one trouble with voting: not only did it used to mean (I am told, though I was admittedly not on Reddit myself yet at the time) that “this content is less relevant”, but moreover, some people think that, while others simply use it as a “Like” button. The discrepancy between those two uses causes confusion - as you say there are conversations that should happen, yet they keep getting buried by using the “dislike” button (or worse, mod removal that likewise can be used to suppress dissenting viewpoints rather than content that is truly not worth seeing).

So I am not sure that I agree with you in all aspects. But I am upvoting your comment for relevance all the same:-).