First and foremost, they are fake internet points. You should not be caring about votes.
Instance admins can pole the database to get that info but I doubt you can as a community mod.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Bad, but unfortunately common take.
Upvotes and downvotes are not meaningless when youβre trying to find actual information and a legitimate helpful comment is buried or disregarded because that account is being targeted by a downvote bot brigade. That actively hurts the community.
Itβs the same reason people are complaining about YouTube removing visible dislikes on videos and why the Return YT Dislikes extension is so important. Itβs often (not always) a quick way to see if a video will be worth watching, especially when it comes to how-to/repair videos.
If Iβm on a motorcycle community and Iβm asking about whatβs the best type of front brakes on my particular year and model of a bike and I see a comment with a ton of downvotes, itβs kind of a red flag to me to examine that comment more carefully and maybe not take it at face value. Thereβs a good chance that itβs bad advice.
They're imaginary internet points, but they absolutely serve a purpose and purposefully muddying up this system does do some harm to the platform and its functionality.
Yes thank you. The YouTube dislike situation is a perfect example of this and why it's more than just the "internet points" for me.
I mean it is what it is, I'm not invested in the points I just don't like the idea that someone is hurting the discoverability of my posts.
But like yeah, whatever I guess.
It is weird that people are petty about that sorta thing. You got banned, big whoop, make a new account an move on with your life.
Exactly, especially when their the one who started this whole mess in the first place. They were pretty hostile up front so I think a screw might be loose or something. I dunno.
Honestly, Iβm really tired of this take. Humans are social creatures, it is normal to care about what others think of us and our contributions to the social fabric. Would you stay in a community where you were only ever downvoted because βyou shouldnβt care about votesβ? That sounds psychotic, or trolling. If somebody followed a stranger down the street shouting you suck every minute, would you tell them they shouldnβt be caring about that?
Not to pick on your comment specifically, I see this phrase all over and I know the intent is not to let online stuff affect your real life/determine your happiness. But the phrasing make it sound like people are crazy to care to care at all, when for the majority of human development the opposite is true and you be crazy not to.
If somebody followed a stranger down the street shouting you suck every minute, would you tell them they shouldnβt be caring about that?
Kind of already happens/been happening?
I'm curious where you live that you get followed/shouted at and it wouldn't affect you? I live in one of the top two largest cities in the US, that does happen here, and it's always something to be concerned about.
They will get bored after a week or so.
Sometimes internet vendettas last for decades. I've seen that more than once.
Hope so, this guy was really pretty terrible for no reason so like idk.
Ignore it.
Yeah, I have been but it's annoying that it's almost all my posts. Like a fly buzzing around your head, there's only so much you can ignore.
Well then if you can't ignore it, make a new account.
That's akin to saying "If the fly annoys you then just move to a different house." I know you're trying to help, but that's just not great advice.
The fly is an actual physical annoyance, someone clicking an arrow pointing down is really not
To you. So you'd be okay with me going through all your posts and downvoting them without reason? Just because I felt like it.
Yes sure, I don't spend much time here anyways
That's akin to saying "no matter what advice you give me I'll just be contrarian about it and keep on doing nothing but complain". You must be fun at parties.
Not at all, I was hoping for advice that I can actually put to use. Saying drop everything and make a new account is not practical nor sensible. Also, when was the last time you were at a party?
Careful there, your fedora is showing.
I just scrolled through 4 days of your posts, and none of them are downvoted.
Maybe the vote system is messed up again.
π€ That's strange, what are you using to view the instance? On desktop at least when viewing the activity breakdown 95% of my posts from the past 2 days have 1 dislike. But maybe you're right.
I'm on Kbin, using desktop/browser. And I did see that there was 1 downvote I missed here, https://kbin.social/m/videogamebutts@lemmy.world/t/261506/In-Game-Street-Fighter-VI-Lily/votes/down
We can see downvotes on kbin, not sure lemmy is the same.
We can see downvotes on kbin, not sure lemmy is the same.
Only from kbin, or possibly even just kbin.social (or whatever one's local instance is). If you look closely, you'll notice that every downvote you can see on kbin is from a kbin user, which is because kbin doesn't federate downvotes from Lemmy.
If you lookat OP's Lemmy profile, you can see a moderate amount of consistent downvoting: https://lemmy.world/u/Call_Me_Maple?page=1&sort=New&view=Posts
That explains why the up/down vote feels broken.
I'm looking at Kbin and at least recent downvotes haven't seem to have registered there yet. Even ones from the past day.
Yeah, we can see the same here and I'm seeing multiple posts that contain that one downvote. Kinda strange that it seems to be showing us different numbers. But I dunno, it's not too big a deal really.
The rep points are messed up on both platforms.
I guess when they decide an account has X number of downvotes that they restrict our access, we can worry about it. But right now, up/down has no real meaning.
Even on reddit I remember people getting mass downvotes and nothing ever happened to those accounts.
Take every down vote as a way to remind yourself that "someone is thinking about me". :)
My little stalker, how quaint. Anyways, thanks for letting me know. :)
There have been other reports of this recently:
Downvotes on kbin are public, but kbin doesn't federate downvotes from Lemmy so unless the stalker(s) are on kbin you can't see them yourself. You profile on kbin looks significantly cleaner than your Lemmy profile... so it doesn't tell us much.
Votes in Lemmy's DB are also not anonymous, so instance admins (or people who run their own instance) could investigate this with direct db queries... it's not exposed via any user-facing API. If you think you're being stalked by a group of sock-puppeted mass-downvote accounts, you could contact the admins via one of the mechanisms listed at https://mastodon.world/about. The email there points to a ticketing system used by the admins I think. Of course, they may be too busy to investigate, but they also may be interested in banning sock-puppets before it gets out of hand.
This is so extremely helpful, thank you so much. I hope you sleep on the nice cool side of the pillow tonight.
That's really weird actually... I'm browsing my posts both here on Lemmy and on Kbin and there's a serious discrepancy between the two like take this very post for example, on Kbin I see 25up and 6down whereas on Lemmy I see 26up and 19down. The upvote difference I think is attributed to the fact that Lemmy give you 1up by default and from the looks of things, Kbin doesn't. What I don't understand is the difference in downvotes, there's 13down that aren't being accounted for on Kbin, I wonder why... π€ And it's not just this post, it's a lot of my posts, one I made on the Mass Effect community has 17up and 1down on Lemmy and on Kbin it's sitting at 1up and 0down also of note, the amount of comments is off, Kbin has 14 and Lemmy has 18. Very odd. I presume if it's happening to me, then it's probably happening to others as well.
- Kbin doesn't federate downvotes from Lemmy, and I believe it has a smaller user population than Lemmy (or at least one that generates fewer total downvotes). So you'd expect downvote counts to be wildly different.
- On upvote counts, federation is just real flaky right now. I don't have GitHub issue links handy, but there are several major issues detailing posts, comments, and votes Federating unreliably. You can pretty easily extrapolate that to expect vote counts to vary by 20%-60% from server to server depending on how many federation messages a particular server decided to drop on the floor on any given day.
Lemmy is pretty cool, but it's a lot rough around the edges right now. It's improving fast, but if you break out the magnifying glass, you're gonna find problems.
I agree that Lemmy and the Fediverse is a really awesome concept and I'm glad to be here. And yeah, I just won't worry about it then, thanks for being so insightful. You've been a big help.
Nothing. π€·ββοΈ
Well at least I asked I guess. π€·ββοΈ
Will you can find proof and show it to the admins. Outside of that, there's nothing you can do.
How am I supposed to find proof exactly? I'd love to, I just don't know how.
I don't know. Your best move is to move on and ignore.
Which was my plan in the first place but I figured I'd ask to see if anything could be done. Oh well I guess. It doesn't really bother me but if you had a spider making a nest in your home, wouldn't you wanna get rid of it too?