If anything, Lemmy is worse. I found on reddit, if you at least provided evidence or support for your argument, most of the time people would at least keep your score neutral. Here though, it doesn’t matter what you provide; even if you are 100% correct with no room for argument, people will still downvote you if what you say doesn’t fit the narrative they want to believe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“…or is this actually a thing now?”
Always has been.
I’ll see myself out.
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
Stop talking about Reddit.
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.
They do not matter at all.
I beg to disagree. If “useless internet points” don’t matter, why is there a billion dollar marketing industry surrounding them? I mean all kinds of data mining conducted on all forms of internet reactions. People are paid good money to crunch these types of numbers, including who is casting the votes (man, woman, white, black, American, not-American, liberal, conservative, etc, etc). Then there is the troll/astroturfing angle. There are different types of campaigns that pay drones to upvote or downvote stuff, for marketing purpose or state-actor agendas.
Sure basing your self-esteem on internet points is harmful and useless, but seeing internet reactions as a narcissist fuel only is also naive and misleading. Given the OP wants to get genuine feedback to his opinions to use as a political or moral compass, the question of the feedback quality is not moot at all.
It should have no bearing on your life what so ever.
The feedback quality is also indeterminate. We can’t know the proportion of astroturf, spooks/trolls, and genuine users in any upvote/downvote score and/or reaction. This can lead to a situation where the feedback to your opinions is always muddy, and vague. Do my opinions suck or is this their problem? In real life you won’t get honest feedback to your opinions anyway, for reasons of politeness. I read once this is why conspiracy theories thrive in Facebook more than Twitter (old study), because a network of acquaintances will not challenge your BS, but a crowd of strangers will.
For all these reasons I think the OP’s question is a valid problem we don’t yet have good answers to. And it is relevant to any platform, Lemmy included.
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!
Lemmy*
POV : you say something moderately supportive of Palestine in the worldnews subreddit
everyday
“Every day”, here, with the space.
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)
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.
What makes you think it isn’t just real people?
It’s almost always instantly. Like sometimes second after posting. Then it either snowballs or it goes back into positive. But initially, be it on Lemmy or Reddit it happens. I’m not constantly complaining about China, the handful of times though, it’s super obvious. Doesn’t happen on other topics.
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
It’s two downvotes (at least on lemmy.ml at this point in time). Is it hard to imagine that 2 out of 16 people could dislike seeing someone say that anything that doesn’t fit their narrative is the result of bots?
At the time of writing that comment, it was 2 - 2, with one upvote from me.
Is it still -2 for you though?
It has 19 upvotes with 2 downvotes at the moment, which is a much more realistic ratio than what it was.
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.
Can we get a sample of these “unpopular opinions”?
You seem to be pretty up voted on a regular basis except a few comments. In my humble opinion, most of them would not be explained by a specific reddit hive mind but rather classic moral panics. I mean, I’ve been campaigning my whole life for prison reform/abolition and that’s the typical kind of reactions I’ve got… irl. I suppose that’s just what you usually get when saying something which deviates from a specific state of public opinion.
Not trying to play ackshually, but there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with your posts/comments, imo.
