I've posted some controversial stuff, and I understand why I would be getting down voted for that. But I see some of my posts and comments are in the negatives for seemingly no reason at all? I don't really care about the karma because I can't see it anyway, but I'm worried that comments and posts here are gonna get downvoted and dismissed without further consideration solely because of the negative score, like what would happen on reddit. I suspect someone, a troll, a bot, or a misclick downvoted my comment or post and people just followed along downvoting in turn. It's either that, or I genuinely said something bad but I can't figure for the life of me that it is indeed bad. My prime example is my support post for commenting under certain posts, why did that get the downvotes? And I see this kind of thing sometimes on other people's comments as well, and I'm baffled, is it me who can't understand why something is bad, or hive mind came here too?
EDIT: it seems i wasn't clear enough. a) I'm not worried about getting the actual downvotes. I'm worried about downvotes stopping to be a tool to gauge content. b) I'm not worried about controversial opinions' downvotes, I already said I'm not surprised I got downvoted there. I was talking about totally mundane posts, like that one support post. c) I'm not talking about people simply disagreeing, I'm talking about people immediately disregarding a post because of the downvote count. it's not correct to say this doesn't happen, it totally does and... how am I supposed to prove that? all it takes on reddit is see a comment on 0 for no reason and see it quickly drop to -5
Maybe it's on a different account but at least on this account I don't see any posts on your profile that are in the negative.
I find it interesting how posts like these only pop up asking about downvotes, never upvotes. Does this "hivemind" only do things you don't like? Is it in the room with us right now?
People have no obligation to interact with anything in any way. There are people who downvote just to make the post go away in some apps. Stop worrying yourself with what gets points. If it's that big of an issue, sign up with beehaw, afaik they don't do downvotes at all.
Huh, I looked and also didn't see many posts in the negative. Then I clicked through to the original instance, and the same posts have completely different scores. Like one post was (+22/-10) on Kbin, and -52 on Lemmy.
Let's all make a test, what does this post look like from your instances:
Coming up as 35 / 0 for me. Strange that none of the downvotes are coming into kbin
I'm on kbin too and I can't see the downvotes OP is talking about either.
I think we're way more sparing of downvotes at kbin because we can all see exactly who upvoted or downvoted what.
But that doesn't explain why we can't even see the Lemmys downvotes.
O score. +34, -34.
+35/-0 for me.
Just shows 33 points for me, both on pc and on the sync app
+2 (38 up/36 down).
36+, my home instance doesn't allow downvotes. https://wayfarershaven.eu/post/115735
+35/-37
+34/no downvotes shown
+3 / -34
I'm on Lemmy and I don't see any points in the negatives, though there is one post on 0 right now
Strange, when I look at OPs history, I see quite a few in the negative. Maybe it's because I'm from a different instance?
Yeah same. I see a mix of positive and negative.
Yeah, federation is not perfect.
You don't hear complaints about it as much but it absolutely does happen. I haven't really seen it here, yet, but I cannot count the number of times on reddit I've seen a highly upvoted comment confidently spouting incorrect information, with replies correcting the information at BEST gaining no traction, but more likely they get downvoted hard for going against the upvoted comment.
That's fair enough, but even in that case I wouldn't call it a "hivemind". I can only speak from my own perspective (don't have stats to support this) but I don't think people click an arrow just because X amount of people have done the same. At least I don't. What it seems like to me is, right or wrong, people will generally behave in ways that reflect their knowledge and level of interest in the subject.
That's not a hivemind or herd behavior or whatever else people like to call it. The masses aren't an NPC that does stuff on auto pilot.
You see the same phenomenon on Stack Overflow sometimes. A confidently incorrect answer will be marked as correct with a tremendously high score, while the actual correct answer languishes somewhere below.