Every comment in this post got 1 downvote for literally no reason. Like… it’s a post about cats, nothing controversial at all. Do people just go around downvoting every post? Why?
I’ve seen this in some communities. It’s hard for me to believe that someone doesn’t know they can just block a community they don’t appreciate. So the next logical conclusion to me is that it’s petty protest, or a weak attempt at vote manipulation.
@WtfEvenIsExistence No worries, they are from trade-based ads-socials. The trade based media, build in them that habit. Try to atack their environment to help them get rid of this addiction.
I suspect this as well. Sorting by new I usually see everything has at least one down vote, it’s not 100% though, otherwise I’d assume it’s just a weird glitch.
It’s a hangover from Reddit culture. People think that the ALL page should be curated for them, not realising that it’s for everyone and that downvotes are for wrong content, not what they consider bad content in respects to their personal taste.
What they don’t seem to understand is that in the fediverse it’s them who are responsible for curating their own experience, there’s no big content algorithm doing it for them here.
It’s their job to join communities they may like and then set their main page to “subscribed”. They don’t have to keep it set in “ALL” if they don’t want to see content from all the servers their server federates with/isn’t defederated from.
Lemmy and kbin may be discussion platforms/link aggregators, but they aren’t reddit.
A downvote isn’t “I don’t think this should be here”. It’s just “I don’t like this”, don’t agree, thing it’s bad/wrong, whatever. Up/downvote systems work under the process of the wisdom of the crowd, and as a result, works under the assumption that while the ways in which people use these tools and the reasons may be different, having a simply up/downvote system means they’ll average out into something more useful. It doesn’t work all the time of course, but it does work generally.
I think you’re wrong. Downvotes are literally meant to be to provide a community powered mechanism to push irrelevant content into out of view, as per the community’s purpose. They are not going to be used as part of an algorithm to push more relevant content to you specifically. Of course, that’s not how a lot of people end up using them, so whether it’s an effective mechanism is another question.
Meanwhile, I’m on an instance that doesn’t federate downvotes, so they don’t affect ranking here, maybe for the better?
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