Users who block do so out of personal interest. That is, there’s something they don’t want to see, so they remove it from their feed. This is as intended. Therefore, those who persistently downvote have different reasons than simply not wanting to see something. No, either they’re voting tactically to benefit their own submission, as OP suggests, or to suppress the existence of whatever content they’re voting on. In both cases, these are the bad actors you refer to. Because their interest in voting is not to curate but to destroy. That particular community, or perhaps the site itself.
I think there are people on Lemmy who wish to see NSFW content entirely removed from the network. We saw an immediate defederation by the .ml communities, for example. These are closely linked to Lemmy devs, who seem to have an ideological purpose behind creating Lemmy, .ml standing for Marxist-Leninist. Now, ironically, Marx and Engles both wrote in support of women’s economic and sexual freedom. I think Engles in particular would have been pleased at the idea of women doing with their bodies as they wish, even if that was exhibitionist on a platform like this. And it should be noted, the Leninist October Revolution led to a sexual liberation movement in Russia that was only suppressed by Stalin after he gained power.
I don’t think devs and the .ml community have read deeply into the original sources they espouse. But regardless, I think there are some people who want to see LemmyNSFW fail. And they’re actively working to achieve that end.
Many users are trained in voting behaviors from other platforms well before they find this corner of the internet. For a lot of younger users who may never have lived without algorithmically decided content the downvote could very well be a misguided attempt at curation. This is just to give a devils advocate argument the benefit of the doubt. Regarding bad actors, if these slightest and petty people they will get bored eventually. If it’s a form of vote manipulation, then it’s really not very effective in the first place since most posts are slow burns around here. It would likely be trivially simple to set up a bot to autosubscribe and downvote all posts as a matter to undermine the community. This would be pretty easy to root out though for anyone with database access.
The ability to decide what you want on your own instance is part of the Fediverse and Lemmy by design. .ml isn’t the only instance to defederate from instances that allow NSFW content and they reserve the right to control what is hosted on their own instance.
Assuming malice based on ideological differences isn’t productive for anyone though. If the devs wanted to undermine the ability for NSFW to be used on the platform they would do it at the code level and not resort to covert tactics to remove it. Not to comment on the devs views on Marxism, but I was also under the impression that .ml was just because they used a mali domain while they were still freely available. I think you’re right that there are certain people that want to see the instance fail for whatever reason and are doing the only thing they know how. The world is filled with small, petty people with as much time as they have hate.
I think you’re very right about a misunderstanding of what upvotes and downvotes do on lemmy, the system that serves posts to users is very simple in lemmy, and some semblance of an algorithm would help a lot.
I also think the downvote issue wasn’t as big of an issue on Reddit because they’ve always fudged their numbers post scores, even moreso when the platform was smaller. They would intentionally make the number of votes fluctuate to prevent downvotes brigading and they would even limit how many votes could be applied to a post at one time. That’s why the top posts of subreddits used to stay the same for literal years, if that many peoples votes made it through, that meant the post got REALLY popular. Maybe that’s something else we could look into.
Here’s a lemmy dev’s essay selection. Now, to be clear, I’m fine with the reading list. I’m all for reading. And I support his right to espouse whatever political beliefs he wishes. But I understand the central Lemmy devs do espouse these beliefs, and the .ml sites are hardline political sites with little allowance for divergent opinion. It’s easy to get banned there. And they defederated for a reason.