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
Somebody targeted me with a mass downvoting of all my comments. It lasted about a day, then they ran out of steam.
I don’t know if Lemmy has mechanisms to stop it. Probably more difficult with the federated instance.
It sucks that someone can effectively block your voice with an across-the-board suppression. I had a reddit account — my first one — ruined by such a thing. Back then, in 2010, every comment I made would drop to -2 or -3 immediately and it basically ruined the account, and it didn’t stop.
So it’s possible. Not sure what you can do to stop it.
Perhaps as long as Lemmy is incapable of detecting and preventing such patterns, you could use a bot to counteract the bot working against you. Something that detects downvote bombing and counteracts it when it’s happening.
I spent over a decade on reddit, and I learned that whenever someone did stuff like that, it was because I had struck a chord. And they usually got bored of their harassment pretty quickly when I ignored them.