this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Anyone else had problems with downvoting bots? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by jballs@sh.itjust.works to c/main@sh.itjust.works
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Earlier today I made a comment that someone must have found controversial, because I noticed that all of my posts and most of my comments made in the last month have received about a dozen downvotes each, all happening today. Has anyone experienced anything similar and is there anything that can be done to combat that sort of thing from happening? I think that reddit used to only shadow downvote when voting from a user's profile. I'm assuming Lemmy isn't that advanced yet.

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[–] FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.works -5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I have an idea about downvoting, and it seems like this would be the place to float it. What if when you downvoted something you had to fill out a box with the reason? I know that you can't hold people to this, but the thought here is to make downvoting more of a conscious decision than just click and move on.

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So like… you can only vote on a comment if you reply to it…?

Might be an interesting concept to play with if it can be done on a test instance (if that exists), but I don’t know if lemmy has the flexibility to do something like that. Even if it does, I would also expect changing the vote mechanism that fundamentally would pretty much break instance federation.

[–] FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

Now that's an interesting twist that I like. Not sure how it will go over based on the reactions I got with my suggestion. My idea was hatched when I was seeing what felt like bot farms just downvoting certain posts to oblivion. And I know this is going to sound all feel good, hokey shit, but I thought 'if people had to think twice before downvoting' maybe it would be a good thing overall. But as we can see, it's not a very popular idea. It would also be like a captcha, without having to get those stupid things involved.

I guess thinking about this, another thought is, what if we just programmed in an option so that you can just turn off the display of votes. I know for a fact that even some imaginary points can have an effect on your mental health so maybe the solution is to just give people the option to hide them. Or how about just hiding them altogether. Maybe someone with some training in psychology can give some input on a better system that this simple up/down voting that would possibly be better for the population as a whole. Regardless, I like your idea too.

[–] glue_snorter@lemmy.sdfeu.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure, if we also agree the same for upvotes. And we accept that the karma system is going to become useless or dominated by the fringe.

[–] FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Ok. I never said it was a great idea. LOL.