There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

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

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.

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.

MiddleWeigh ,
@MiddleWeigh@lemmy.world avatar

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

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

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.

Moghul ,

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.

kat ,
@kat@feddit.de avatar

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?

eendjes ,
@eendjes@feddit.nl avatar

Yeah same. I see a mix of positive and negative.

Blamemeta ,

Yeah, federation is not perfect.

darq ,
@darq@kbin.social avatar

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.

kat ,
@kat@feddit.de avatar

Let’s all make a test, what does this post look like from your instances:

https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/5f6ff7f7-ad22-414a-b829-e379dc62998d.png

darq ,
@darq@kbin.social avatar

+35/-0 for me.

atlasraven31 ,

O score. +34, -34.

AnonymousLlama ,
@AnonymousLlama@kbin.social avatar

Coming up as 35 / 0 for me. Strange that none of the downvotes are coming into kbin

livus ,
@livus@kbin.social avatar

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.

AngryDemonoid ,

+3 / -34

emilygage ,
@emilygage@lemmy.ml avatar

+2 (38 up/36 down).

hsl ,
@hsl@wayfarershaven.eu avatar

36+, my home instance doesn’t allow downvotes. wayfarershaven.eu/post/115735

Dantpool ,
@Dantpool@lemmy.world avatar

+34/no downvotes shown

Moghul ,

Just shows 33 points for me, both on pc and on the sync app

baduhai ,

+35/-37

Moghul ,

I’m on Lemmy and I don’t see any points in the negatives, though there is one post on 0 right now

Perfide ,

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.

Moghul ,

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.

blivet ,

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.

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.

alokir ,

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.

6mementomori OP ,

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

alokir ,

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.

plumbercraic ,
@plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

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)

Sinnerman ,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning

plumbercraic ,
@plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

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.

neptune ,

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.

Neato ,
@Neato@kbin.social avatar

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.

restlessness ,

You sound mentally ill.

Neato ,
@Neato@kbin.social avatar

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.

restlessness ,

Get your hysteria treated

hariette ,
@hariette@artemis.camp avatar

Lol how old are you?

CeruleanRuin ,

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.

alokir ,

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.

tc43 ,

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.

Blaze ,

I’m not sure, but I guess there is no real way to address this until we have public downvotes as on Kbin.

pogosort ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    Blaze ,

    Yes, hopefully that comes to Lemmy too

    pogosort ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    Blaze ,

    There is (mostly the issue tracker on Github), but at the moment they have bigger fish to fry

    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.

    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

    eendjes ,
    @eendjes@feddit.nl avatar

    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.

    6mementomori OP ,

    I understand, that makes sense. I have a really hard time with good sentence structure

    eendjes ,
    @eendjes@feddit.nl avatar

    It really is. Luckily it’s a skill that can be trained.

    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.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •