genuinely helpful and honestly meaningful (especially if you’re going to invest any level of your mental health in posts (which i don’t recommend but is natural if you try to post what’s on your mind)) being able to see like, oh even if 20 people downvoted me, 7 people agreed with me, i have seven fighters. it’s so much better to see that and get a fuller picture of how your comment was received.
i remember seeing reddit make that change out of nowhere for no reason and thinking…jesus, this is the beginning of the end
I find it’s helpful when you get like 18 upvotes and 22 downvotes.
If I just saw 4 downvotes I’d be thinking “did I really say something that stupid?”, so it’s nice to know that at least some people are on the same wavelength as me.
Sometimes situations like that show how many people actually read your carefully worded comment, and who just slapped the down arrow after skimming the first line. Some people can’t handle subtleties.
Sometimes…
Boo, downvote!
Reddit used to do that, then they changed things to prevent vote manipulation. Then they straight up started manipulating the vote count themselves.
I’m kind of waiting for the time Lemmy does the same.
I don’t think it’s possible to do on Lemmy without complete structural changes and possibly abandoning activityPub & federation altogether
You can even check who upvoted what with enough work.
Closest you could get would be to change the UI to not display the vote counts, but anyone could get around it by using a different app or UI so it’s more of a suggestion
Yeah lemmy is vulnerable to vote manipulation at its core, and there’s virtually nothing anyone can do about it. All the more reason not to care about vote scores, imo.
The less vote scores matter, the more likely to be accurate they are because there’s no motivation to bother manipulating them.
It’s harder to implement things that will influence the psychology of the user and their behaviors (ex. Hiding vote counts for some time, fuzzing the specific values)
But it’s also easier to catch bad actors. If you can see who voted on what, you can more easily catch vote manipulation, brigading, or bad faith downvoting
Nah you can’t really trace vote manipulation, because someone manipulating votes can work across multiple instances while admin can only supervise their own instance. They could develop a network of trust (ie user data sharing) between instances, but that would undermine the principles of federation. Even with such a network, there would always be an inherent trust needed for small instances to take part.
Like I say, the best solution is to just accept that internet points don’t really matter.
Pro tip: You may not see votes that people on other instances see. This is why you’ll see comments about “people downvoting” when you don’t see any downvotes on the comment specified. Probably is the same for post votes.
Reddit obfuscating vote counts was part of its “vote fuzzing” feature. The goal was to make it impossible for ninja banned accounts to know if their votes were actually being counted. So banned people/bots would keep using their banned accounts rather than make a new one.
that was the idea, anyway. of course, anyone using a 3rd-party app was able to get the real vote counts. and it only ever worked when shadow banning was a thing, which they (mostly) stopped doing years ago. don’t know if that’s back because i left months ago.
That was the idea, until Reddit realised the potential of manipulating vote counts for their own benefit.
also true, but that’s a whooooole other load of spezshit1.
[1] spezshit-- bullshit, but from spez
Unless you’re on an instance that disabled downvotes… looking at you lemmynsfw…
Simply view it from another instance.
All I see is overall vote count for both posts and comments? Using Sync for Android.
Same, but with Connect
Maybe Sync has something similar to Liftoff? On Liftoff you can click the … Button and then “nerd stuff” to see all the deeper info shared by a post, including the individual up/down counts and “boosts.”
It even lets you see what users voted in what way (*if you’re an instance admin) so now you know for sure when 1 angry dude is just following you around, down voting everything you post milliseconds after posting.
It’s also great that you can join a server with downvote disabled entirely and just ignore everyone who has a problem with it. And/or turn off vote display entirely in some apps and not feed the scoring addiction at all. It’s such an effective cockblock for people who specifically say dumb things like “enjoy the downvotes.” Nope, joke’s on you, pal. Nothing but positive feedback on my end.
Ignorance is bliss, but the rest of us see you getting trashed when you say dumb shit
Here, someone else for you to downvote
Also, fuck them birds, they’re destroying orchard crops at the moment. No sympathy. If my cat catches one, I’m giving him a treat.
This coming from the moron who thinks coyotes are on Maui.
Doesn’t matter, go off with your circle jerk.
edit: to whoever replied to this, good for you, whatever it was, apparently I’ve already blocked you, or voyagerapp deemed it unnecessary to show it to me.
Reddit term detected. Mods, crush his skull, thank you
LOL, perfect example
Yes, saying coyotes are on Maui is a perfect example of a dumb thing to say.
Here, let me stomp on that dick for you.
Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen any “enjoy the downvotes” comments on Lemmy yet. Can’t say I miss it.
Oh, the Redditors are here, with their usual rhetoric.
With the plethora of sorting options given here, the votes can truly be meaningless. Like if you sort by New Comments, the only thing pushing a post to the front page is someone making a comment on it. So the only stuff you see every time you refresh the FP is something people are actively talking in.
The numbers really only matter in Active, Hot and Top. And New Comments is a much better way of finding out what is both hot and active, even when it’s only hot and active because people hate it and are expressing how much they hate it.
