Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All.
Important notes:
- I don’t use scripts.
- I don’t mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don’t like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
- Some of the communities I was banned from don’t have any posts in them so I wouldn’t have been able to downvote anything.
- Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It’s quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
- One of my bans reads “Appeal Granted, not a brigading member” but I’m still banned.
- I don’t troll.
WTF is going on here?
the whole “if you don’t like the content, don’t downvote, but just ignore / block it” is really cringe
It depends. If there’s certain types of content you don’t like that a community mostly deals in, you downvoting it effectively means you’re downvoting almost everything on there - and at that point, it’s just little more than a very crude attempt at community vandalism.
Your voice matters. Downvoting can be useful to prevent echo chambers (ex: downvoting lemmy.ml bs)
Now if the thing is just not fundamentally wrong like it’s just subjective and you don’t like it, yea it could harm, but the most likely is that less people will do it than people liking this type of content will upvote
Its only really problematic on smaller instances or if you do it continuously for every single post without a good valid reason
And that’s closer to what I am referring to. If someone just hates movies or TV and doesn’t want to see it on their feed, they should block it rather than downvote every post from movies and television communities. They aren’t somehow mitigating an echo chamber by signifying how they hate movies and TV content. They’re just vandalising it.
Yea for sure
I believe most “vote manipulation” bans aren’t really on that case though
It’s mostly “you strongly disagree with us? Fuck you!”
Yeah, I mean I wouldn’t call it “manipulation”. Just vandalism in this case.
I don’t use upvotes to express my support, I upvote when a contribution was insightful, interesting or funny and downvote when I find the contribution off topic, not helpful or diverting/trollish.
If I personally find something uninteresting, I block. And report if something is against the communities the rules/TOS/law.
To each their own I guess
Downvoting posts in the All feed isn’t that bad, as it reduces their visibility if you believe it doesn’t interest you at all and probably most interest many other people, so you let a chance to other posts to show up
Yeah I think big level at the feed, down votes help control what is interesting conversation pieces and not and then in the comments it should be related to how on topic or useful or fun to the conversation presented by the original item.
There is some extremely childish behavior on Lemmy in regards to downvotes and in response to them as well.
Downvoting comments I don’t agree with doesn’t seem that bad either
It’s useful to show that not everyone thinks the same. When I see controversial comments and posts, it sparks my curiosity and I start really thinking about it
Right but if you disagree shouldn’t that be vocalized otherwise the downvote doesn’t make sense and people don’t know what the countering opinion is?
I get it’s not everyone’s responsibility to respond but… It doesn’t really make sense as just a tool to show disagreement and provide diversity in the comments.
But someone making an opinionated statement, sure at the top level the votes just act as a miniature poll but beyond that I’m not sure I see it’s usefulness as a conversationary tool.
You can’t expect everyone to voice everything. Someone else probably will at some point, and anyways, seeing downvotes is useful to know that there’s no full consensus
It can also allow you to fact check, to an extent, what’s said
Seeing an high amount of downvotes means you shouldn’t trust what’s written without prior research. It stands for everything, but we don’t have time to check most information we learn nowadays
I do not find upvotes and down votes to be very guaranteed to match facts and using it as a checking tool would require a very different user ase that would likely not be human. But I understand you said to an extent. I just… Give it less slack. But hard down voted, sure, needs way more reservations.
I am just saying the point of these forums is more the conversation and less the voting and it’s really not very useful as a tool, while not being useless.
Imagine a substack post, as these forums were based on, where someone asks for support with a batch script and someone suggests using a sticky note taped to the monitor. It gets downvoted but no one offers any countering support.
No one would use the site for support anymore. It’s clearly not with helpful information, and the person looking at it would not know but just see what looks like an unkind user base.
I compare lemmy to reddit, where voting is important, so I kinda like it, but still feel free to express what I want to say because votes don’t have a risk of me locking or shadowbanning my account
Lemmy isn’t really meant for support, but anyways, there will always be someone to help or reply, trust me, people (including me) can’t stop giving their opinions or showing off
If you don’t want to focus too much on the subject, voting is an easy way to generate interaction, show that the subject is alive and stuff
I probably wouldn’t often go to Lemmy if it didn’t have votes to be honest. I like leaving my mark, and voting feels like i’m contributing to the ecosystem a bit
No it isn’t only my opinion matters. Your opinion desnt matter