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.
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.
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!
This has always been a thing and is one on Lemmy too.
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.
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.
5 memes a day? Are you kidding? I get tons in my feed.
5 memes a day is not enough for a bathroom break
Ask your doctor for a stronger prescription.
Ain’t much better in here kid.
It’s the same here, except it’s tankies.
It is, here we have hopeTM
Really, really pessimistic hope though lol
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.
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…
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.
Disney coming for you, for misusing their copyright!
oh no!
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.
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.
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.
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.
everyday
“Every day”, here, with the space.
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.
real. That’s my problem, they don’t have opinions just one good button and one bad button.
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 :) )
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.
Fwiw, apps like Boost don’t even show avatars (unless you tap through to the profile)
You have 2 down votes currently, so I’m going to downvote without reading. Sorry, thems the rules.
:(
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.
thats so true. i once was downvoted to oblivion because i asked what the posted meme meant since it wasnt obvious
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.
“…or is this actually a thing now?”
Always has been.
I’ll see myself out.
Reddit hivemind has been a thing for the entire history of Reddit.
But not this strong. Since the fuck spez event, you can barely get any answers in the help subs, and you get instantly downvoted when you say something different. They once banned me from a subreddit and suspended me for 7 days from the entire platform because I said „No”. This place is much better, but it feels empty.
Don’t worry, it is empty and thats what makes it better.
Oh and there is already a hive mind mentality on Lemmy.
BTW, I think spez is bottotting shit to inflate reddit usage, and hive mind hijacking is a easy way to do so.
I haven’t seen the hivemind stuff here yet luckily. Also, what is „hive mind hijacking”, I haven’t heard about that before.
I think you might need to take a look at lemmygrad or hexbear, they are a hivemind.
And hijacking as in gathering the time between a certain number of votes (in general) and letting the bots they use vote as well and in a non obvious way. At least thats basically how I coded my reddit bots back in the days…
They might be blocked on lemmy.world, I haven’t ran into them in a long time. Also, thanks for the explanation!
They are, hexbear users were downright unbearable. (Heh)
Oh yeah, also their giga emote spams, but also just generally annoying.
I haven’t been on reddit for years but I always remember it having this problem. My first account was made just so I could get that /r/atheism circlejerk out of my feed.
I don’t know what it’s like now but keep in mind that in addition to the growth, reddit has been taken over by corporate interests. That, and the big increase in traffic, means it’s more of a target for botfarms and things of that nature.
Best way to avoid this problem is to just participate in the smaller niche subreddits in my experience.
In my country it just became an actual „political platform”, the opposition leader started hosting an official AMA today. Maybe like with all things, it’s just politics ruining everything.
Might depend on the sub but it’s always been part of my experience on reddit. I’ve already been downvoted to something like - 70 for explaining commonly misunderstood game mechanics cause I’m a nerd and when I really like a game I like to know how it works in detail. Those were easily verifiable facts.
Out of interest, which game was it?
Zombie mode from CoD. Most people play it casually but there is a handful of people trying to push the mode to its limit and I’m pretty much in-between those two groups, I lack the skill from the top players but I’m more dedicated and knowledgeable than the casual crowd.
That’s not specific to Reddit. That’s just how humanity behaves in large groups. We’re just too damn tribal.
