This has always been a thing and is one on Lemmy too.
You get reactions on your comments? Reddit is notorious at gaslighting you and never showing your comments (and even posts) to anyone but you and the people you’ve shared direct link to. It does this to something like tenth to third of your comments, depending on how civil you are.
Though, to be fair, it’s not even the worst at it. Youtube is where you go if you want to throw your thoughts directly into a black hole.
Stop talking about Reddit.
It happens here too. This place isn’t exempt.
It does make you wonder if some of the instances were onto something with getting rid of the downvote button. They say it promotes discussion over just downvoting without any information as to why it was bad.
The flip side would be that it allows misinformation to not be shown as such as evidently.
I don’t think that getting rid of downvotes is a good idea, it’s a great tool, just a lot of people use it incorrectly
“…or is this actually a thing now?”
Always has been.
I’ll see myself out.
My dude, there are plenty of actual automated bots on Reddit. IIRC when Reddit cracked down hard on bot accounts recently, over half of users and participation in many subreddits also decreased. That alone says that there is artificial engagement on Reddit rather than genuine human interaction (which vindicates the dead Internet theory). It explains a lot as to why a very innocent and neutral comment somehow gets a downvote: they are just bots downvoting.
Even here in Lemmy, there are downvotes on the same benign comments and no explanation as to why someone would disagree. But even if the comment is political in nature, there are downvotes but no feedback as to why one would disagree. There is a post on c/climate on European Greens calling for Jill Stein not to run for US presidential elections because she would just siphon the votes from liberals and progressives even though she will not win. And many comments on that post are getting half or a third of downvotes, but there are no accompanying disagreeing comments to explain the disagreement. It is clear that there are bots in that post who are trying to downplay the repercussions of Stein running to US elections and democracy.
Some of us downvote without leaving a comment, that in and of itself isn’t indicative of bot activity.
A tap of a vote is low effort and easy.
I know some people down vote and don’t discuss, but it’s very strange in a political discussion when you don’t get a pushback but getting so many downvotes.
Id expect more voting and less comments in political posts just because people may want to avoid direct conflict with other users. I’m iffy on the whole up/down thing in general though.
I don’t really understand what you’re getting at.
People often downvote without posting a comment as explanation.
I’ve noticed lemmy users do this more than reddit.
The explanation is simply that they don’t like the vibe of what you’re saying but don’t know how to respond.
For example, I definitely see the decrease in frequency, or not at all, on Reddit philosophy getting into frontpage despite having millions of subscribers. Many posts from r/philosophy often would gain thousands of up votes landing them into the front page. However, since Reddit’s crack down on bot activities, I see r/philosophy posts getting only a fraction of the number of up votes they used to get, which makes almost none of the posts go into the front page. It is clear evidence that bots manipulate the votes.
I don’t know about you, but others also noticed completely innocuous and benign comments just getting a downvote. Before I would chalk it up to people just down voting for no reason or to downvote others to propel their own content at the expense of others; but after what transpired with Reddit’s crackdown on bot activities and user participation just so happened to decreased significantly? One would have to admit or acknowledge there is deliberate manipulation on what contents get to be seen or promoted long before and even as we speak.
I think you might be talking about vote fuzzing. This denies bots the ability to check whether they’re banned.
Votes shown are inaccurate by a few votes . You can’t check whether your vote was recorded by refreshing the page.
Just ignore up and down votes. They do not matter at all. If someone or a group don’t like your comment, well that’s a them problem. It should have no bearing on your life what so ever.
Votes decide which comments get shown or not, and in which order. If you don’t care whether you are being heard, then you might as well just talk to a wall.
The votes still represent something in my opinion, that’s why they’re there. And I really don’t like it when I spend time writing, sometimes researching, formatting and somebody just says „no, this is shit” without even reading the first sentence, because they can just do that.
I’ve read your comment and decide it is shit, you should feel bad and go touch some grass no life loser who doesn’t get any pussy
You put atleast 130 times more effort to this comment than the average downvoter, thank you, you get my upvote!
I think it happens all over and sometimes it really kind of depends on how long your argument is and the general impression people get from the first part of it. If you’re making a devil’s advocate argument in the first part, but then the twist comes later on, people are going to think your first devil’s advocate argument is the gist of it and downvote you based on that alone without getting into the nitty gritty. If people can form a knee-jerk reaction within the first few seconds of reading your post, they will, nuance gets lost.
I tend to leave really long comments, sometimes with a bit of raw information, so I see how that can be the case. Some communities like reading all the way trough, but I’m pretty sure that in some places, they don’t even read my username, just vote based on my avatar.
You have 2 down votes currently, so I’m going to downvote without reading. Sorry, thems the rules.
:(
Fwiw, apps like Boost don’t even show avatars (unless you tap through to the profile)
Ain’t much better in here kid.
It is, here we have hopeTM
Really, really pessimistic hope though lol
Disney coming for you, for misusing their copyright!
oh no!
And instances can turn off downvotes!
Turning off downvotes is terrible. There should either be no voting, or up and down votes, with both displayed separately. This “upvote” only nonsense was created by corporate sites to make everything look popular for increased engagement, therefore increased ad views. No idea why Lemmy would follow that example.
I support downvotes too, even if it doesn’t look like it from the post. If it’s used correctly, it’s a really good system.
pretty sure because there’s a bunch of amateur porn communities, and people generally stop posting pics of themselves if they get downvoted.
so, since downvotes literally kill those communities, they added the ability to not display downvotes.
my only gripe with this is, that it’s apparently an instance-wide toggle, which is a bit inconvenient…
It’s the same here, except it’s tankies.
It’s also a lot of bots. They are here too. For example, just say China plus something negative about them,
in a thread about China. Easiest downvoted one can get. Make sure it’s a fact and not whataboutism, to avoid contaminating the test.Okay: China sucks, they try to hide the Tianmen square massacre and the genocide of Uyghurs.
I mostly see them on political communities, but based on your downvotes, they might be getting out
Lemmy*
I find it so easy to ignore the votes because all I care about is engagement. IDGAF about the arrows. Talk to me. Tell me why I suck.
You suck because when you put a popsicle in your mouth, you don’t chew it, you lick it.
(/s of course, I have nothing against you :) )
real. That’s my problem, they don’t have opinions just one good button and one bad button.
Are you talking about here? Or Reddit? I’ve definitely noticed some downvote trolling has been picking up here.
Here seems to be quiet, but it also feels empty. 5 memes a day is not enough for a bathroom break, and the total post count isn’t much higher, even when counting the US politics stuff that I as a hungarian have no interest in.
5 memes a day is not enough for a bathroom break
Ask your doctor for a stronger prescription.
5 memes a day? Are you kidding? I get tons in my feed.
I know it means nothing but, as an American, I’m sorry for the havoc our political system wreaks on your feed and on the world in general. We’re not thrilled about it either, typically.
POV : you say something moderately supportive of Palestine in the worldnews subreddit
Your first mistake was going to reddit.
It has lots of very active niche communities that lemmy just doesn’t have. If you really want them then you have pretty much no choice. It’s also still a very useful site for your browser searches because of the amount of information on it.
It was useful.
Still is, I regularly get great results from it.
True, using Google. But all this information was posted a while ago, usually at least year ago if not few years. This is my experience anyway.
The choice is to start a similar community here and start siphoning users.
I’m going to need a charisma check with double disadvantage on that. Good luck.
Many niche communities have more activity than lemmy itself or something rivaling lemmy. You’re missing my point about lemmy not having enough people. Lemmy is literally carried by few select posters. What’s worse is the fact that many communities straight up can’t be carried by 1 person because it’s for example a community for people’s personal stories and just copy/pasting it to lemmy would kill all nuance to it.
