I’ve posted some controversial stuff, and I understand why I would be getting down voted for that. But I see some of my posts and comments are in the negatives for seemingly no reason at all? I don’t really care about the karma because I can’t see it anyway, but I’m worried that comments and posts here are gonna get downvoted and dismissed without further consideration solely because of the negative score, like what would happen on reddit. I suspect someone, a troll, a bot, or a misclick downvoted my comment or post and people just followed along downvoting in turn. It’s either that, or I genuinely said something bad but I can’t figure for the life of me that it is indeed bad. My prime example is my support post for commenting under certain posts, why did that get the downvotes? And I see this kind of thing sometimes on other people’s comments as well, and I’m baffled, is it me who can’t understand why something is bad, or hive mind came here too?
EDIT: it seems i wasn’t clear enough. a) I’m not worried about getting the actual downvotes. I’m worried about downvotes stopping to be a tool to gauge content. b) I’m not worried about controversial opinions’ downvotes, I already said I’m not surprised I got downvoted there. I was talking about totally mundane posts, like that one support post. c) I’m not talking about people simply disagreeing, I’m talking about people immediately disregarding a post because of the downvote count. it’s not correct to say this doesn’t happen, it totally does and… how am I supposed to prove that? all it takes on reddit is see a comment on 0 for no reason and see it quickly drop to -5
Maybe it’s on a different account but at least on this account I don’t see any posts on your profile that are in the negative.
I find it interesting how posts like these only pop up asking about downvotes, never upvotes. Does this “hivemind” only do things you don’t like? Is it in the room with us right now?
People have no obligation to interact with anything in any way. There are people who downvote just to make the post go away in some apps. Stop worrying yourself with what gets points. If it’s that big of an issue, sign up with beehaw, afaik they don’t do downvotes at all.
Huh, I looked and also didn’t see many posts in the negative. Then I clicked through to the original instance, and the same posts have completely different scores. Like one post was (+22/-10) on Kbin, and -52 on Lemmy.
Let’s all make a test, what does this post look like from your instances:
Coming up as 35 / 0 for me. Strange that none of the downvotes are coming into kbin
I’m on kbin too and I can’t see the downvotes OP is talking about either.
I think we’re way more sparing of downvotes at kbin because we can all see exactly who upvoted or downvoted what.
But that doesn’t explain why we can’t even see the Lemmys downvotes.
O score. +34, -34.
Just shows 33 points for me, both on pc and on the sync app
+35/-0 for me.
+2 (38 up/36 down).
36+, my home instance doesn’t allow downvotes. https://wayfarershaven.eu/post/115735
+35/-37
+34/no downvotes shown
+3 / -34
I’m on Lemmy and I don’t see any points in the negatives, though there is one post on 0 right now
Strange, when I look at OPs history, I see quite a few in the negative. Maybe it’s because I’m from a different instance?
Yeah same. I see a mix of positive and negative.
Yeah, federation is not perfect.
I find it interesting how posts like these only pop up asking about downvotes, never upvotes
You don’t hear complaints about it as much but it absolutely does happen. I haven’t really seen it here, yet, but I cannot count the number of times on reddit I’ve seen a highly upvoted comment confidently spouting incorrect information, with replies correcting the information at BEST gaining no traction, but more likely they get downvoted hard for going against the upvoted comment.
That’s fair enough, but even in that case I wouldn’t call it a “hivemind”. I can only speak from my own perspective (don’t have stats to support this) but I don’t think people click an arrow just because X amount of people have done the same. At least I don’t. What it seems like to me is, right or wrong, people will generally behave in ways that reflect their knowledge and level of interest in the subject.
That’s not a hivemind or herd behavior or whatever else people like to call it. The masses aren’t an NPC that does stuff on auto pilot.
You see the same phenomenon on Stack Overflow sometimes. A confidently incorrect answer will be marked as correct with a tremendously high score, while the actual correct answer languishes somewhere below.
Op’s question is not a question at all. It’s a scare mongering tactic that invents a hivemind boogeyman, claims victimhood, and seeks weaker minds to join his false crusade. At best, he’s looking for attention.
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Well that was an excellent, nuanced, comment - cheers. I have seen examples supporting OPs observation, but I’m too new to know if this is a change.
Yup.
I’m not entirely sure what this is. is this an attempt at a gotcha?
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You said some controversial stuff and are upset that you got downvoted? Grow up, not everyone has to like what you say and if you’re so needy for validation say something you know won’t get pushback.
One of the things I found annoying on reddit was when people would cry about getting downvote instead of making a comment without worrying about whether they got downvoted or not.
Making edits crying about getting downvoted or first saying I’ll probably be downvoted for this but… I really disliked those.
But, I will agree that it is preferable to leave a message explaining why someone disagrees rather than just downvoting. Whining about it is just as annoying though. If my instance let me downvote I’d downvote those comments even if I agreed.
I said that’s not the comments I’m interested in. I already said I can understand why those get downvoted.
I read through some of your comments with lots of downvotes, I have a theory why you were heavily downvoted.
First, people use the dowvote button as a way to express that they disagree, not that they think the content is low quality or unfitting. I don’t see how we can change this other than not having a downvote button at all, this seems to be like an outcome of the up/downvote system.
Also, you seem to be a person of principles. I know the reactions too well because I also think similarly. For example, I think judging someone by the color of their skin or ethnicity is wrong, and it seems like you do so as well.
You have a heavily downvoted comment under a post where some Russians faced discrimination and it wasn’t clear if it was happening because they were Russians or there were some other reasons as well. You noted this, and got downvoted because people think racism is ok now because Russia (as a country) is an aggressor in a war.
People are too quick to put you in a box if you don’t 100% follow their narratives and say even one thing that remind them of others who genuinely belong in that box.
Honestly it’s a problem with binary ranking systems across the board. Maybe if there were additional axes you could vote on, like “agree/disagree”, “quality/low effort”, “nuanced/trite”, etc. I don’t know how one would go about implementing such a thing, but until someone does, we’re stuck with having a simplistic system that doesn’t adequately reflect the complicated responses real people have to content.
Slashdot had something like this back in its day, you could upvote for Funny, Insightful, etc, and it worked quite well. No idea what it’s like these days though.
Unpopular opinion but I think the emoji system of Facebook, Github and Slack are much better. We could have something similar with a limited amount of emojis and rank posts and comments accordingly.
coming from r/PCM I was used more to downvotes being in fact used for filtering low quality stuff out, that being said I already mentioned that’s not the type of comment I’m talking about, I expected to get downvoted in the controversial comments. I was talking about more mundane stuff
Aaaand there we are. 100% of these posts whining about being down voted and censored come from fascist havens or are bigots. Lol PCM. No fucking wonder.
It’s because if you have that kind of mind, your “normal” comments might not be as tame as you think.
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Here’s another classic post from you
And it’s already lefty infested, too.
Edit: the army of soy guzzlers downvoting me does kinda prove my point, guys.
Fascists and bigots always love questioning the mental wellness of people who call out their obvious bullshit.
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Lol how old are you?
I have a hard time trusting your opinion of community and online discourse if you came from PCM. That was an insular community astroturfed to push the Overton window rightward. It’s about role playing genocide. It’s for laughing about police shootings and marginalizing trans people. If you don’t think PCM was designed to build a hive mind through performative conflict, then so help you God.
Some people are petty and will go thought your profile to downvote everything. I’ve read about and seen some people even stalking users, commenting on every post they make. There was an AuthRight guy on PCM who was followed around and called a Nazi on unrelated subs the moment he commented something.
I heard that reddit faked these kind of votes. So they looked like they worked to the voter, but noone else could see votes cast from the profile page. Don’t know if it’s true, but it is a cool idea (I don’t think votes on out of contex comments are “valid” I guess, insofar as Internet points can be considered valid)
I’m aware of shadow banning as a concept. But this is different isn’t it? A shadow ban let’s somebody post to a community, while not letting them know that they have been banned. Clever, I guess, but intentionally opaque and it doesn’t sit right with me ideologically. As an admin, I would love this feature though. Interesting that I have a different position on voting vs posting. Maybe I have a deeper belief that an individual’s comments matter more than their votes.
The hive mind is whatever the community upvotes. It’s inherent and was always on Lemmy as well as any other place that allows upvotes and/or downvotes.
I haven’t run across any content that had down votes that I couldn’t understand a reason for. Either whatever was being said was untenable, controversial, negative, or hostile.
Humans have emotions, and certain interactions with people will get a certain emotional response. People are utilizing the downvote to express this. So being blunt, controversial, negative, inciting an argument is going to get these kind of responses. It’s just human nature.
Try not to think of upvotes and downvotes as anything meaningful beyond hey did I make somebody smile by saying this or frown by saying this. And people frown at things all the time
Downvote bots are here as well, though. Recently I was helping someone see whether they are downvoted by bots.
Here’s the post I’m talking about: https://a.lemmings.world/lemmings.world/post/214059
Seen plenty of people calling for the de-federation ban-hammer whenever they find comment they like. There’s fine line between having an open space and an echo chamber and if it were up to these people we’d federate with no one
A) There is no hive mind. That’s just you perceiving a bunch of people who happen to hold a similar opinion as a monolith, and that’s an illusion. You have no data whatsoever to support the idea that they’re thinking in concert or even have the same reasons for their reactions.
- Don’t take it so personally. They don’t know you, and they’re not attacking you by downvoting you. They’re simply expressing “I want to see less of this.”
d) Instead of having a kneejerk reaction when you get this kind of response and immediately being defensive, step back and use it as a reflective moment. Maybe you misjudged the room, misinterpreted the potential impact of what you posted, or are simply on a different track from those who downvoted. What can you learn from it? Do you need to change your own approach, or do you need to reevaluate your audience?
Buzz McCallister, is that you?
I’m not sure how you can claim there is no hivemind. it’s been a well known fact masses tend to do that. but even ignoring that, I was talking about another phenomenon, where one downvotes brings to another 10 for no reason other than that the downvote was there, which is a pretty common occurrence on reddit. as for d, i thought about that, couldn’t think of anything, except for the political stuff, which I already mentioned. I already said this, because I was hoping to get useful feedback, which completely did not happen.
I’ve only skimmed your comments, but I think a factor is also that a lot of them are really hard to read.
Examples I see are weird sentence structure, the lack of paragraphs for longer messages, the lack of capitalisation, and rather odd/hyperbolic use of words (writing in the same way you’d speak?). This “style” just gets interpreted as “noise” when I’m reading it, which will get downvoted as it doesn’t contribute.
English isn’t my first language either (it’s not even my second or third!) so I understand it’s very hard to get these things right. But without sufficient clarity you will get downvotes, as it just comes off as noise.
I understand, that makes sense. I have a really hard time with good sentence structure
It really is. Luckily it’s a skill that can be trained.
Who do you think is coming over from reddit. aliens? Cows? It’s humans bro, you’re going to have the same problems as long as it revolves around people and their relationship.
Somehow lemmy is supposed to represent something different while being made up of the same people? This is kind of a silly point to be questioning
Sad to hear the aliens won’t be joining us.
bro
I thought we were done with this shit a decade ago, when the internet became so ubiquitous that even my grandmother started using forums and posting on Reddit.
chill, bro
I went through some of your comments to see. The most recent ones where you said that the who categorized meet as bad as plutonium is not exactly right… it put it in the same category as plutonium, but didn’t say it was “as bad” when it comes to causing cancer. Some of your comments are awkwardly phrased and wordy with odd punctuation, sometimes people just get weird about that sort of thing. Obviously your most downvoted comment in recent is about Ukraine and any time you speak a strong opinion on Ukraine and Russia and what not who knows…could be a whole bunch of people from other places coming in to down vote because of political ideology. There are a lot of people on Lemmy with pro-Russia leanings.
Some of your comments that are downvoted to negative 2 or 3 do seem to be for no reason that I can see. 🤷🏻♂️
the “as bad” was an oversimplification I made over there, but guess I’m not surprised at that one.
A lot of your comments come off as passive aggressive or snarky, to be honest, man. Including this one. I took several minutes to look and gave you some thoughts. Sometimes it’s not what you say but how you say it. If you want to say something smart and not care if people like it or not don’t worry about the downvotes. If you do care…change up your phrasing to show people you are listening and offering something constructive.
how would I change the phrasing in the prior comment
you should try https://goblin.tools/Judge
how this works? chatGPT?
very cool btw
yeah, I read that it’s running on OpenAIs services for now. It has a lot of neat features
I agree that the downvotes on your posts in the Jerboa community are rather strange. My theory is that people who downvote your more controversial stuff subsequently go through your whole profile and just downvote everything regardless of content.
It would help if everyone tried to interpret other people’s comments in the best possible way, rather than in the worst possible way. It leads to much more interesting discussions.
Unfortunately, that is very unlikely to happen.
I’m not sure, but I guess there is no real way to address this until we have public downvotes as on Kbin.
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Yes, hopefully that comes to Lemmy too
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There is (mostly the issue tracker on Github), but at the moment they have bigger fish to fry
