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Is it me, or the hive mind mentality has come over here as well?

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

MiddleWeigh ,
@MiddleWeigh@lemmy.world avatar

Consciousness is wild. I’m pretty sure I can feel all of you in my head, for sure.

Andiloor ,

Sometimes, hypothetically, you post cringe. It’s ok, I post cringe sometimes too

ShrimpsIsBugs ,

Yes because this isn’t a reddit phenomenon but a human psychology phenomenon

akulium ,

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.

Saigonauticon ,

I don’t see the point of voting on online content, and just ignore the feature entirely. My brain automatically edits out the voting buttons and results. I don’t even see them!

Without offense intended… I didn’t come here for your (or anyone’s) approval. Other people’s opinions have universally baffled me as a general rule (yours probably will too).

I came here to document my radical opinions about assembly language programming, post photos of stuff I build, occasionally help other people build stuff, and (of least concern) occasionally participate in conversation. I imagine very few people (other than myself) care about anything I have to say – it’s still a neat exercise to put it into words so I better define what I think.

So maybe people are downvoting you because they don’t like you, or don’t like what you write. Maybe they do it for no reason, or for fun. Maybe I don’t like you, for an arbitrary or a good reason, or both. At some point I guess we just have to be comfortable with these things I guess and coexist here somehow. At least you can’t pay money to a platform, to force me to read your opinions, I guess! That would be torture.

Anyway, no one actually needs to worry about me not liking them or username-stalking them. The depths of my indifference are fathomless, and eternal. To make me care about what you think is like bridging the void between the stars.

nihilomaster ,

You are still affected by this. Upvoted posts and comments tend to show up earlier in your feed (except if you’re sorting strictly by new). Some instances may even decide to auto-hide content below a certain threshold. So a politically motivated group or even just a person with a significant enough bot-army could manipulate post visibility and kinda soft-shadow-ban people they deem unfavorable.

Saigonauticon ,

OK, I’ll give you that. I don’t really use the whole feed thing often, and that didn’t occur to me. It doesn’t seem to be a problem so far, though.

If that changes, I’ll write a Lemmy reader that strips out the democratic elements and just sorts by newest for me (if someone else doesn’t do it first). Probably less work than managing an army of Lemmy bots. I wrote and manage just one – a fortune teller that lives on my instance and does I-Ching readings.

Do other people use the feed a lot? I haven’t really used social media prior to Lemmy. A lot of what people consider important comes off as a bit alien to me.

trimmerfrost ,

One of the answers to have a ‘controversial’ or ‘bottom’ sort order for posts and comments

trimmerfrost ,

You can hide post and comment votes on many Lemmy clients. Try it. I can assure, you will sleep a little bit better

Saigonauticon ,

My mind automatically filters them out already. It’s really weird. Sort of like banner-blindness.

Like, I know they’re physically there, and I can see them if I stop and willfully look for them. Otherwise all I see are the words and the buttons though.

Aphroditusss ,

It’s rare to feel like downvoting every post on a user’s profile. But when it happens, the person is always a piece of shit. I saw some people saying that you are a fascist. If true, that’s the reason you’re getting the downvotes, it’s because you’re a piece of shit.

6mementomori OP ,

I’m not even sure what I’m doing to be a fascist tbh

lemann ,

He said “if true”

Personally after a quick 10 second scroll of your profile you seem like a curious but chill guy 🤷‍♂️

It could be that you’re posting stuff to the wrong-but-similar communities/a particular community could be a bit hostile towards some viewpoints/not reading sidebar rules before posting

6mementomori OP ,

yeah I know, I was talking about other people calling me that.

Blamemeta ,

You gotta realize that being fascist has nothing to do with 1930s Italy. Its to do with name calling those whose views are to the right of Marx. And thats only slight hyperbole on Lemmy.

trimmerfrost ,

If you go on a right wing instance, you will get downvoted for having left wing opinions. Just like you do for having right wing opinions. Downvotes don’t mean anything

Dinodicchellathicc ,

There are right wing instances? Do they have goofy names like lemmyright.net

voidwalker ,
@voidwalker@lemmy.villa-straylight.social avatar

Welcome to the internet! We have bots and people who act like bots.

In all seriousness though, I think that this is just a flaw in the voting system and human behaviour. People like to go with the general concensus instead of thinking for themselves. It feels like people genuinely have difficulty in thinking about things and act as automatons a lot of the time. I also have a suspicion that bots are involved but I don’t have any evidence though it does seem to be a theory that has circulated on the internet for some time.

RedditWanderer ,

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

GroteStreet ,

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.

MrMonkey ,

chill, bro

nuez_jr ,

Sad to hear the aliens won’t be joining us.

Lauchs ,

Which posts are you thinking of? I looked at your history, only one post appears to be in the negative, and that’s in c/support which to me suggests you might be posting an already discussed problem.

6mementomori OP ,

I had already looked for such a question to avoid duplicates. it also seems looking at accounts from other instances changes how you see the voting

Lauchs ,

The question you asked was pretty similar to this one:

lemmy.world/post/1674334 which had been asked a couple days prior.

And my guess is that vote counts from different instances should look different depending on which instances each has federated/defederated with.

6mementomori OP ,

and that was not the issue I was having. nor was the fix working

Lauchs ,

It’s the same sort of issue, comments not showing up. Which is a pretty generic problem.

It just seems pretty silly to attribute this to a hivemind. Interestingly, when people upvote your posts, you don’t attribute that to a hivemind…

6mementomori OP ,

not not showing up, comments not being posted altogether. the post was about being unable to comment on some specific posts from different instances, being able to comment on other posts from the same instances, it has nothing to do with that. and no, I do, the same type of phenomenon does happen with upvotes, just to a minor degree. because downvotes provoke a bigger reaction. I’m an example. I just listed the downvotes cause that’s what I noticed. I was worried about the downvotes because I couldn’t figure out why random comments got downvotes. why do these replies keep having to be this kind of gotcha’s

Lauchs ,

why do these replies keep having to be this kind of gotcha’s

In two cases in a row, your first inclination has been to claim persecution instead of any “hey, why might people be disagreeing with me?” Maybe, instead of defaulting to “I am correct, why are these people voting incorrectly?” think about how your actions, comments and posts are appearing to others?

I don’t post in c/support community, nor am I really inclinced to read much more of their post history. (Though the community does say to send bug reports to a specific site rather than create a post.)

Instead of sending a bug report in, you’ve made a very short, not particularly descriptive post without examples, without mentioning what client you’re using to browse, not saying when (did this happen during a ddos attack?) This is pretty non helpful from any tech support standard.

So, in my own support work, I would be annoyed if I received this because it means instead of giving me anything useful, I have to coax information out of the client as I would a child.

As to the wider “why are people downvotint/being negative?” I mean, your FIRST reaction to negativity is that everyone else must be a hive mind. Instead of looking for any culpability, you’ve just determined everyone else must be wrong and crazy. That’s more than a little insulting and speaks to a persecution complex. It’s silly when trump does it, it’s sillier when you do it.

You’ve basically accused the Lemmy community of being too dumb for independent thought simply because sometimes your comments are downvoted or disagreed with. Not only is that impressively childish it’s incredibly insulting. No wonder people are primed to disagree with you! I don’t imagine your comments are randomly being downvoted, I imagine you are similarly missing social cues or otherwise being, possibly completely accidentally, a complete dingus.

Instead of accusing everyone else of being too stupid for independent thought, maybe consider what in your behaviour is provoking such a reaction. And be grown up to admit that not everything you say will be upvoted and some of it, will, gasp be downvoted.

6mementomori OP ,

I had already addressed everything you mentioned here in the post

Lauchs ,

If you think you did, then you need to work on human to human communication.

CeruleanRuin ,

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.

  1. 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?

synae ,
@synae@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Buzz McCallister, is that you?

6mementomori OP ,

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.

Teknikal ,

Not quite as bad as Reddit I once said I had A Huawei phone and liked it there and I was forced to delete the comment because of downvoted.

Classic case of daring to speak your own opinion against the hive.

Monkeyhog ,

You weren’t forced to delete it, you deleted it due to cowardice and unwillingness to stand by your statement.

Teknikal ,

I was at about -60 or so 30 min In, it would have ruined my karma completely to let it keep existing.

On Reddit people only see see the downvote and jump on. There’s no chance of people giving it even a read they just join the swarm.

vinceman ,

I can’t believe that you’d make this post then be dumb enough to admit to being a /r/PCM user. Thanks fascist, I’m glad you aren’t comfortable here.

CeruleanRuin ,

Give him some slack, he’s young. At least I assume so.

Bread ,

Yes fascism is bad, but you don’t change minds and have productive conversation with aggressive language.

6mementomori OP ,

I see we’re resorting to accusing of fascism again

hsl ,
@hsl@wayfarershaven.eu avatar

My experience on Lemmy has been greatly improved by turning off downvotes. It’s not worth the mental energy.

howrar ,

Unfortunately, turning off downvotes for yourself does not turn it off for others. You’ll get little to no discussion if no one sees your comment.

hsl ,
@hsl@wayfarershaven.eu avatar

Right - but then I don’t spend the mental energy thinking about the score. I leave my comment and then move on.

intensely_human ,

Somebody targeted me with a mass downvoting of all my comments. It lasted about a day, then they ran out of steam.

I don’t know if Lemmy has mechanisms to stop it. Probably more difficult with the federated instance.

It sucks that someone can effectively block your voice with an across-the-board suppression. I had a reddit account — my first one — ruined by such a thing. Back then, in 2010, every comment I made would drop to -2 or -3 immediately and it basically ruined the account, and it didn’t stop.

So it’s possible. Not sure what you can do to stop it.

Perhaps as long as Lemmy is incapable of detecting and preventing such patterns, you could use a bot to counteract the bot working against you. Something that detects downvote bombing and counteracts it when it’s happening.

CeruleanRuin ,

I spent over a decade on reddit, and I learned that whenever someone did stuff like that, it was because I had struck a chord. And they usually got bored of their harassment pretty quickly when I ignored them.

mysoulishome ,
@mysoulishome@lemmy.world avatar

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. 🤷🏻‍♂️

6mementomori OP ,

the “as bad” was an oversimplification I made over there, but guess I’m not surprised at that one.

mysoulishome ,
@mysoulishome@lemmy.world avatar

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.

6mementomori OP ,

how would I change the phrasing in the prior comment

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