Ain’t much better in here kid.
It is, here we have hopeTM
Stop talking about Reddit.
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.
:(
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.
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.
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.
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
Your first mistake was going to reddit.
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.
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.
That’s weird, because it also has 2 downvotes for me at the moment (which means it can’t be some weird federation issue), but assuming that you originally saw 2 downvotes before I came along, then something something can’t be right because I am one of the two downvoters and I only saw the comment some hours after your comment in this thread (judging from the timestamp of my comment) (or maybe I visited the post once, then came back to leave a comment?).
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.
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.
Thanks for the review!
“…or is this actually a thing now?”
Always has been.
I’ll see myself out.
thats so true. i once was downvoted to oblivion because i asked what the posted meme meant since it wasnt obvious
POV : you say something moderately supportive of Palestine in the worldnews subreddit
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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.
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.
This has always been a thing and is one on Lemmy too.
