At least on Reddit there was some leveling of downvotes built into the algorithm. This site is making it seem like any slight disagreement leads to downvotes thus encouraging more echo chambers. Maybe it’s the communities I’m commenting on?
I’ve seen downvotes on cat photos. Some people just downvote.
Of course, sometimes it’s because swiping might not always work correctly: I found on an earlier version of Lemmy, before actual arrows, that accidentally downvoting sort of locked the swipe in place, such that I couldn’t switch to an upvote without really fiddling with it, and some might not notice or go back and correct it.
It might be growing pains, it might be trolls, it might be earnest but sincerely pigheaded people: who knows? It’s a small userbase, too, so 3-5 baddies makes up a much larger portion of active users than on even a small subreddit, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. You can’t please everybody, so just focus on having good conversations with people: the ones who are worth it are listening to you first before worrying about votes.
You will get downvoted in any disagreement, that’s not exclusive to reddit or Lemmy, that happens in any social media with downvotes.
The purpose of downvotes is to show what the general people in that common section think about your comment. You shouldn’t give any hoot about it other than the info it provides.
Obviously, if you are talking in controversal topics or ones with conflicting sides, you are gonna see alot of downvotes. Its just people expressing their opinion.
Echo chambers are just a natural part of communities. People often come to feel validated so they stick to ones with the same thoughts as them. I don’t recommend trying to argue/discuss with people who only want to “win” cuz there’s nothing to gain.
Talk with those who argue because they want to learn or understand something better. (or perhaps help you learn something new)
Thanks. I could be wrong, but I think on certain apps (like connect) with enough downvotes comments become hidden. I think my issue is that there isn’t enough of a user base to even out the benign downvotes, and as a consequence any pushback on anyithing gets buried instasntly
There’s no mechanism against brigading here but it would be interesting to see who the downvoters are (since that information is exposed to any federated instance admin anyway), and exposing them might actually be a good way to disincentivize rage-downvoting and other toxic behavior. I’ve been followed by the same 4~5 downvotes for a few days and then they apparently got bored and disappeared at the same time, but what was funny was that that number of downvotes appeared every time almost immediately after me posting anything (and I already have a few guesses as to who they might be).
Anyway, there’s no karma system on Lemmy, so it’s not as impactful as on Reddit, but it does introduce negative bias for others before they even read what you wrote.
So here is an upvote for you.
It’s a bit vague from your post if you were referring to here or reddit, but I do want to inform the passerby that downvotes and upvotes are indeed public on Lemmy’s API, and app devs coul implement a name list of who downvoted and upvoted you if they wanted.
Not downvotes, but I have noticed that some of my comments are either being deleted or hidden?
Either it’s an issue on Lemmys end, or we got Spez wanna be mods in here deleting shit they don’t like or disagree with.
Modlogs are public on Lemmy, you could check
I’ve noticed that other people’s comments are hidden on some posts I’ve seen, like it says there are 8 but I see 2.
Is this a Mastodon/kbin versus Lemmy issue, is that it? I was under the impression that Mastodon users can post to Lemmy but not vice versa, but I don’t know anything about not being able to see comments in a post whose instance you can interact with otherwise.
comments are hidden on some posts I’ve seen, like it says there are 8 but I see 2.
Lemmy has bug in counting too. Comments are often missing because of replication issues between servers. But the most common issue I’v seen with inflated comment numbers is edits being counted as new comments.
edits being counted as new comments
Ooooh that makes sense. I’ve probably contributed to that, dealing with typos. Hope I haven’t been confusing anybody (else)…
Some apps have that issue, I believe.
Try loading the website and see if your comment is there?
Very possible. And honestly something I hadn’t even considered.
I recently notice increases in the number of downvotes and posts/comments wiyh negative points
Not only downvoted, but my comment was also deleted by someone after it had like 60 downvotes. When that happened, I started considering moving away from Lemmy right after coming here, because it seemed to be a worse echo chamber than Reddit had ever been.
Only because it wasn’t easy and also not easily accessible via Memmy (which I really like) I stayed for the time being. For example, I can’t login to a kbin account (only subscribe to kbin communities) and I don’t have access to Mastodon using Memmy.
So I guess already like Apollo kept me with Reddit, Memmy keeps me here for the time being. I stopped participating in anything remotely controversial though and became a lurker because I learned that day, discussion and a variety of opinions are not what the majority of users here are after. Maybe that’s true for all social media, idk…
Continue to still interact or else it will become an echo chamber
It’s already an echo chamber. That’s just how human interaction is. People aren’t going to share unpopular opinions just to be argued with and downvoted. It’s not worth it.
Take the recent question about religion. No way am I going to answer that, because I’m not atheist and I know how non-atheists are treated online.
I hear you, but I’m not here to fight or be accused, ridiculed or hated upon. You can’t save people from themselves.
If it were only a few, but -60 within a few hours with such a small amount of Lemmy users tells me, this is not the place for civilized discussion. Not to mention that it got deleted… no thanks, I won’t be putting too much work and thought into critical comments anymore when there’s a risk of going to waste anyway.
I dunno, I’m just used to seeing upvotes when I’m supporting the thread I’m commenting in and downvotes when I am not.
The upvote system is stupid
