I read in lemmy support that this is a significant problem. I don’t get it. What does anyone gain in down voting without reason?
I’m on lemmy for some time… Never noticed there’s a problem regarding this? If anything, up/downvotes rarely matter at all.
Not everyone is worth engaging with.
How come you’re only focusing on downvotes but not upvotes? People can give their approval without question but if they disapprove then they must explain themselves? Sounds like toxic positivity.
If you approve someone, you don’t need to explain yourself, you would just say “I agree with this guy”. There’s no substance to it.
However, if you downvote, you are saying “this is wrong”. Which is much different. When you accuse someone of being wrong, you should explain yourself, otherwise you’re being a dick.
It’s fine if someone already answered with what you were going to answer. You can just upvote that guy and move on.
Downvotes degrade post visibility. So if I go into a community and downvote every post, it hurts the community. At least if its a smaller community. If the mod then spots that, they may reasonably decide to ban me.
Obviously larger communities wouldn’t notice.
And? Upvotes increase visibility.
Why is one bad but the other is acceptable?
It’s also not an issue in “smaller communities” because there’s not enough content to bury heavily-downvoted posts anyways.
And? Upvotes increase visibility.
Correct. And communities aspire for visibility. So someone coming into a community to downvote all the posts will potentially be banned for harming that communities visibility.
Why is one bad but the other is acceptable?
Because the point of the Fediverse is to grow, not degrade. Also, it’s not downvoting per se that is viewed as inherently harmful - it’s bulk downvoting of posts. If someone who doesn’t like metal music enters [email protected] and downvotes every post there - and commits themselves to doing it to every new post, this hurts their visibility across the Fediverse. Would you not say its reasonable, in this specific hypothetical, for the community owner to ban a user who does that?
It’s also not an issue in “smaller communities” because there’s not enough content to bury heavily-downvoted posts anyways.
A newly made post that gets downvoted to 0 quickly after being posted is rendered effectively invisible on the fediverse. I’ll give you my own experience: When I was growing [email protected] before lemm.ee shut down, the community collected about 5 frequent downvoters. None of these accounts ever upvoted anything. They never participated by posting or commenting anything on the community. In a few cases, two of the accounts had no posting history on the fediverse at all. They existed purely to downvote. Whether because they didn’t like television as a topic, or hated news articles being posted - I don’t know. But they would, between them, always downvote posts and sometimes do so early - deprecating their visibility. After I banned them after a time, I noticed an improvement on the community.
If you’re not making posts that the community members want to see, then they are justified in downvoting you so that they do their part to influence the culture of the community.
The fact that you’re only targeting downvoters and not upvoters leads me to believe you want to surround yourself with yes-men instead of authentic humans.
If you think 5 people downvoting you is what’s stopping your posts from gaining visibility, then you are simply incorrect. Lemmy is still very small and most communities that aren’t tech or politics aren’t “visible” because they lack activity.
If you’re not making posts that the community members want to see, then they are justified in downvoting you so that they do their part to influence the culture of the community.
The point is non-community members downvoting everything. When there are five people active in a community, five non-communists downvoting everything can seriously hurt the community’s reach even when people are browsing their subs with a scaled sort.
If you’re not making posts that the community members want to see, then they are justified in downvoting you so that they do their part to influence the culture of the community.
If they’re not interested in metal music then they’re not ever going to be part of the community, so if they don’t want to see anything there - there can just block the community. That’s what the block button for communities you don’t like is for.
Why should a metal community orientate itself and placate itself to what people who don’t like metal like? If someone started downvoting all metal music videos on the community and said they were doing so because they don’t like metal, then why would I keep them around to keep doing that?
The fact that you’re only targeting downvoters and not upvoters leads me to believe you want to surround yourself with yes-men instead of authentic people.
I don’t look at it anymore for the most part. Most people upvote as a matter of normality. I want content to spread across the fediverse.
If you think 5 people downvoting you is what’s stopping your posts from gaining visibility, then you are simply incorrect. Lemmy is still very small and most communities that aren’t tech or politics aren’t “visible” because they lack activity.
The community was much smaller then, and they would hurt visibility by getting in quickly and preventing the posts from trending. I don’t really know how you can also claim that multiple accounts with no post history, and sometimes no upvoting history were remotely authentic accounts sincerely interested in meaningfully positively impacting the fediverse.
I don’t have the energy to keep engaging with you, so I’m just going to downvote and move on.
Have a nice day.
You asked, I answered. :shrug:
Why is one bad but the other is acceptable?
A bit like being nice and polite would seldom be frown upon but acting like a dick would?
Can you make your argument without resorting to inaccurate analogies? That way we can focus on the topic instead of getting derailed.
If the mod then spots that, they may reasonably decide to ban me.
That is not reasonable…
Do you do that?
Because if so I’ll block all your communities right now even tho you got some good ones.
That is childish behavior and any mod that engages in that, is likely doing other shit that isn’t as obvious. And I just want no part of it. I’ll go to any other community or make my own if it doesn’t exist.
What makes you think it’s without reason?
If a spam bot or a trolling account comes along I go on a downvoting spree.
What makes you think it’s without reason?
There are entire instances where if you down vote stuff without leaving a comment to explain why, they ban you…
So OP and others see those people act like downvotes are a huge deal, and they believe them
Lemmy is too small for it to make sense. I can easily read through all threads all the way through the controversial posts and still run out of content daily.
It made sense on Reddit, where accounts could be worth money and/or used for advertising, or some people thought karma points was worth it, or that posts there had influence, which they did for a while. The Unidan affair was only about votes, and showed how a single user manipulated the majority of readers into something that was WRONG ON THE INTERNET, which should be a crime.
Finally there’s also people who view everything as a competition and just want the high score in that imaginary game. Endorphins or something. I’ll admit that I have a longer streak than necessary in some apps too, but I’m no cheater. I wouldn’t get my high off that anyway.
I rarely downvote, but then again, every upvote is like downvoting everyone else, and I surely don’t want to upvote everything.
It can be used to manipulate the sorting order of posts and it can also be used for targeted harassment of users.
As someone who was banned after downvoting anywhere from 1-3 comments from a mod before, I’d take these claims that it’s a huge problem with a grain of salt though. Some people, including mods, just take downvotes very personally.
One of the many reasons I’m thankful that my instance doesn’t federate downvotes.
When you use a sort order that incorporates votes it pushes posts/comments lower in the feed, making them less visible.
I quite liked lemmyNSFW for not federating downvotes. Now they’re/we’re/I am on PieFed I’ve been looking for a way to hide downvotes. My engagement can just be reply/upvote/ignore/block/report. I understand why people downvotes, I’m happy you all have them. I’m just not personally interested in them.
I normally do not notice but one guy took something I posted the wrong way I noticed a bunch of downvotes on it fast. Even recently I had some responses of folks sorta defending what I had. So it makes me wonder if all the downvotes are from multiple actual sources or generated by the one person but I can’t imagine going through whatever hoops you would to have multiple accounts to do multiple downvotes. I still really like the trust cafe thing with ranking everything but its basically for yourself and the feed algorithm. Rank someone low and in your feed their stuff will get pushed down. rank someone high and their stuff gets pushed up. I dunno possibly or I can see it taking into accounts ranks of ranking at lesser degrees as you go out in degrees of freedom. I guess what im saying is ranking and voting makes the most sense like most things to be just about an account and not a community thing.
The first assumption should be that multiple down votes on a single post or comment is from multiple people, the same as assuming multiple upvotes from from multiple people.
Yes, there are people who create bot farms to mass down vote and up vote. They are not that common despite claims by mods and admins that it is impossible that five people might be browsing New decided to down vote their AI slop shortly after it was posted.
yeah this was wierd because honestly I don’t see how he got his take from what I wrote and I did not get other replies bent our of shape about it. I have reread my initial comment and there is kinda an outside chance you could take the term “worse situation” and apply worse to be about some othere spot in it, if you get the word order stuff messed up in the head. I suppose it could be a pile on effect.
The down votes were others who had the same or a similar take. If you get one reply that explains clearly why they think your take is terrible and you get a dozen down votes and they get a dozen up votes it is safe to assume a dozen people agree with the person who replied and didn’t feel the need to repeat the same point. Even if their reply has less, it just means some people disagreed and didn’t bother replying.
It is the same as up votes being higher than the number of replies. There isn’t a need for everyone to post ‘same’ just because they agreed.
AI slop is absolutely one of the few things that absolutely gets bulk downvoted to be fair. You’re right there.
That’s why most AI-content communities have huge banlists.
By bulk you mean a lot of users don’t like it and as a group choose to down vote it because it is crap?
The AI content communities have ban lists because they don’t like the fact that nobody wants to see their slop. The ones I know of don’t gain any traction on posts that don’t have down votes.
By bulk you mean a lot of users don’t like it and as a group choose to down vote it because it is crap?
Yes, in this case.
The AI content communities have ban lists because they don’t like the fact that nobody wants to see their slop
Sure, you could say that. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to communities that are potential targets of heavy downvoting to respond to it, no?
The ones I know of don’t gain any traction on posts that don’t have down votes, so all it does is create a one person echo chamber for the AI slop community mod.
Pretty sure dbzer0 has multiple AI communities, no? So it’s more than just 1 person. Dbzer0 is the pro-AI (relatively speaking) instance here.
Sure, you could say that. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to communities that are potential targets of heavy downvoting to respond to it, no?
Their response is to ban people who disagree instead of maybe considering that AI slop communities are terrible and nobody wants them. You know, like how a MAGA community being down voted should maybe consider the crap they are posting isn’t wanted. Yes, I am saying that AI slop communities are a comparable detriment to the fediverse in the same way as having a hate group community. Not an equivalent, but also bad and the large number of down votes should be a sign they are not wanted.
Pretty sure dbzer0 has multiple AI communities, no? So it’s more than just 1 person. Dbzer0 is the pro-AI (relatively speaking) instance here.
There is a difference between spamming a bunch of overly specific AI slop communities and a few general purpose AI topic communities. There are some dedicated AI communities that are successful, especially ones based on local models. Those are fine and I don’t down vote those, just ignore them.
For example, there are a number of very specific AI communities like AI witches and AI mushrooms and AI cats with orange hair or some other overly specific topic and blocking a bunch of those is way more tedious than a couple communities. The low quality and volume of it is just spam nobody wants, and we should absolutely down vote spam.
Their response is to ban people who disagree instead of maybe considering that AI slop communities are terrible and nobody wants them.
Clearly if someone made that community, then at least someone wants them. I imagine there’s some others that do want them.
You know, like how a MAGA community being down voted should maybe consider the crap they are posting isn’t wanted.
I mean, MAGA communities also get banned for conduct - but assuming they didn’t, it would also make sense for the owners and moderators to ban downvoters too.
Yes, I am saying that AI slop communities are a comparable detriment to the fediverse in the same way as having a hate group community. Not an equivalent, but also bad and the large number of down votes should be a sign they are not wanted.
And people can solve it by blocking those communities. So what’s the problem?
For example, there are a number of very specific AI communities like AI witches and AI mushrooms and AI cats with orange hair or some other overly specific topic and blocking a bunch of those is way more tedious than a couple communities. The low quality and volume of it is just spam nobody wants, and we should absolutely down vote spam.
Then they’ll ban you.
And you can’t stop them from banning you. So what’s the problem?
No, one person making a community doesn’t mean that any additional people want that content.
The AI communities that do mass banning were initially doing it as ‘vote manipulation’, which can be seen by other moderators and if taken at face value can lead to future moderation issues due to word of mouth.
Plus when you are banned from a community it takes extra effort to block in some interfaces. At the time I was using lemmy and you had to go to settings and look up a community you were banned from to add it to the block list because the sidebar hid the block option when banned as subscribe and ban are in the same interaction block thingy. Since they banned from about a dozen communities I had to document the names of those dozen communities so I could look them up in settings to block them from clogging up my feed.
The problem is that they are intrusive, annoying, and how they handle down votes makes everything worse. Just because I down voted one stupid AI slop post that came through my All feed.
AI slop communities are a spam problem.
I’m not really sure, either. Do some Lemmy clients curate what’s in your feed based upon votes? If that’s the case, I can see people trying to manipulate that…
Posts organised by /hot/ organise posts by upvotes, so yes.
Can be like a kind of passive hate?
It’s not much of a problem because downvote spammers usually get banned from tons of communities in short order, and then instance banned if it’s particularly egregious.
It’s only a problem when new accounts spawn to bulk downvote.
