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
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.
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.
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.