General Discussion

Hell, I love downvotes. It either means I'm wrong and need to check myself, or I made some people really mad. Win win.

Pineapple belongs on pizza

More often than not, when I see I've been downvoted, I take pride.

You guys are getting downvotes?

I have OP tagged as vegan douche, lmao

Unlike Reddit, there is no profile Karma in Lemmy. Downvote me all you want you bastards!

Downvotes without replies mean nothing. I'm hurt if someone actually refuted or corrected my comments with valid view points, which happens all the time and I take that L and learn from it.

I have no reason to not talk what I think here, except for doxxing and irl saftey off course. Also fuck censorship. I actually expect one day for my account to get banned by some power-tripping or PC mod. I'll just add +1 to my username and migrate to another instance xD

The incredible urge I have to downvote this post from all my accounts 😫😫

But honestly I can't imaginge anyone cares enough to do that do they?

Even my most controversial posts have had maybe a 100 downvotes I wanna say. And that would be for a post with a lot of engagement. Posts with little engagement barely cross 10-15 downvotes even at their most controversial.

Ive found Lemmy much less stressful to use since I just turned off vote count visibility. Less urge to check on how my comments are doing despite it not really mattering.

Never put more of your attention on the downvotes you get vs the upvotes you get.

A handful of downvotes is normal.

I downvote whenever I don‘t like the news. Is that wrong?

I think my instance has downvotes disabled or hidden. It also has a neat alternative front-end which turns upvote buttons into hearts, so it's more of a "like" count.

It's much more peaceful that way.

Yes, and ignoring the popularity of a comment is liberating. That said, I always worry about offending people I actually agree with due to wording. Like, Lemmy is fairly international, plus text can be ambiguous in tone sometimes (and people suffering depression or have various conditions can read neutral as negative or hostile, etc.)

If they comment, I try to clarify things and/or apologize, though. Hurting a nice, kind person (even if a stranger) can bother me for quite a while... Though I suppose they're not at likely to mass down vote you if they're kind.

I don't. Not even that 1 dipshit that goes out of their way to downvote me instead of simply blocking me. Let them seethe.

One angry conservative downvoting everything all day long, every day.

Or, if it bothers you too much, just join an instance that doesn't show downvotes.

I just view downvotes as "these people are not seeing what im seeing". It certainly doesnt chance my mind. I need actual arguments for that.

This being posted in a Lemmy.world forum is especially poignant given that it seems to be by far the instance most riddled with state and political actors trying to manipulate opinions, with quite a number of those being actual instance admins or moderators of large forums there.

Beyond that and more in general, on certain subjects it's pretty obvious that there are people going around using either bots, multiple accounts or working in synchrony with others to "juice" the impact of their posts - you post something well thought and reasoned which is critical of one of such people's posts and when they respond to it with their own post, within a few minutes their post has 5 or 10 upvotes and yours the same downvotes, yet when you come back and check it hours later, unless it's deep down in a tread, everybody since has been upvoting your post with no upvotes for the other one.

In some things there's also this funny effect that might be due to bot/propaganda farms or geographical: for example, as an European with an European point of view, I'll often in Politics forums point out the hypocrisy of some things said and done by US Democrats and the tribalist types over here pretty much parroting the party propaganda line, because for me who have a far broader political culture than if had only experience American Politics, it's painfully obvious, and if I do that during the afternoon and night here (so morning and midday in the US), it quickly attracts a lot of downvotes, yet often if I check it out later, that post is slowly attracting more upvotes than downvotes and ends up with a slightly (or at times strongly) positive net vote, which I believe is either because there are actual organised propaganda activities on major Lemmy Political forums by the US Democrat Party and they focus on going after fresh posts in such forums and move on after a while (so their impact on votes is front-loaded) or people from geographical locations other than the US are far more likely to have a view on US politics similar to mine than Americans (so I'm getting more downvotes during US prime Lemmy-usage time and more upvotes the rest of the time).

Mind you, this is all self assessed "strange" observed patterns, so take it with a pinch and expect it to be heavily tainted with things like Confirmation Bias.