2y ago

Is it me, or the hive mind mentality has come over here as well?

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

126 comments

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:
  
  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.
- I find it interesting how posts like these only pop up asking about downvotes, never upvotes
  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.

Op’s question is not a question at all. It’s a scare mongering tactic that invents a hivemind boogeyman, claims victimhood, and seeks weaker minds to join his false crusade. At best, he’s looking for attention.
- Well that was an excellent, nuanced, comment - cheers. I have seen examples supporting OPs observation, but I'm too new to know if this is a change.
- Yup.
- I'm not entirely sure what this is. is this an attempt at a gotcha?

You said some controversial stuff and are upset that you got downvoted? Grow up, not everyone has to like what you say and if you're so needy for validation say something you know won't get pushback.
- One of the things I found annoying on reddit was when people would cry about getting downvote instead of making a comment without worrying about whether they got downvoted or not.
  Making edits crying about getting downvoted or first saying I'll probably be downvoted for this but... I really disliked those.
  But, I will agree that it is preferable to leave a message explaining why someone disagrees rather than just downvoting. Whining about it is just as annoying though. If my instance let me downvote I'd downvote those comments even if I agreed.
- I said that's not the comments I'm interested in. I already said I can understand why those get downvoted.

I read through some of your comments with lots of downvotes, I have a theory why you were heavily downvoted.
First, people use the dowvote button as a way to express that they disagree, not that they think the content is low quality or unfitting. I don't see how we can change this other than not having a downvote button at all, this seems to be like an outcome of the up/downvote system.
Also, you seem to be a person of principles. I know the reactions too well because I also think similarly. For example, I think judging someone by the color of their skin or ethnicity is wrong, and it seems like you do so as well.
You have a heavily downvoted comment under a post where some Russians faced discrimination and it wasn't clear if it was happening because they were Russians or there were some other reasons as well. You noted this, and got downvoted because people think racism is ok now because Russia (as a country) is an aggressor in a war.
People are too quick to put you in a box if you don't 100% follow their narratives and say even one thing that remind them of others who genuinely belong in that box.
- Honestly it's a problem with binary ranking systems across the board. Maybe if there were additional axes you could vote on, like "agree/disagree", "quality/low effort", "nuanced/trite", etc. I don't know how one would go about implementing such a thing, but until someone does, we're stuck with having a simplistic system that doesn't adequately reflect the complicated responses real people have to content.
  
  Slashdot had something like this back in its day,, you could upvote for Funny, Insightful, etc, and it worked quite well. No idea what it's like these days though.
  
  Unpopular opinion but I think the emoji system of Facebook, Github and Slack are much better. We could have something similar with a limited amount of emojis and rank posts and comments accordingly.
- coming from r/PCM I was used more to downvotes being in fact used for filtering low quality stuff out, that being said I already mentioned that's not the type of comment I'm talking about, I expected to get downvoted in the controversial comments. I was talking about more mundane stuff
  
  I have a hard time trusting your opinion of community and online discourse if you came from PCM. That was an insular community astroturfed to push the Overton window rightward. It's about role playing genocide. It's for laughing about police shootings and marginalizing trans people. If you don't think PCM was designed to build a hive mind through performative conflict, then so help you God.
  
  Aaaand there we are. 100% of these posts whining about being down voted and censored come from fascist havens or are bigots. Lol PCM. No fucking wonder.
  It's because if you have that kind of mind, your "normal" comments might not be as tame as you think.
  
  Some people are petty and will go thought your profile to downvote everything. I've read about and seen some people even stalking users, commenting on every post they make. There was an AuthRight guy on PCM who was followed around and called a Nazi on unrelated subs the moment he commented something.

I haven't run across any content that had down votes that I couldn't understand a reason for. Either whatever was being said was untenable, controversial, negative, or hostile.
Humans have emotions, and certain interactions with people will get a certain emotional response. People are utilizing the downvote to express this. So being blunt, controversial, negative, inciting an argument is going to get these kind of responses. It's just human nature.
Try not to think of upvotes and downvotes as anything meaningful beyond hey did I make somebody smile by saying this or frown by saying this. And people frown at things all the time
- Downvote bots are here as well, though. Recently I was helping someone see whether they are downvoted by bots.
  Here's the post I'm talking about: https://a.lemmings.world/lemmings.world/post/214059

The hive mind is whatever the community upvotes. It’s inherent and was always on Lemmy as well as any other place that allows upvotes and/or downvotes.

Seen plenty of people calling for the de-federation ban-hammer whenever they find comment they like. There's fine line between having an open space and an echo chamber and if it were up to these people we'd federate with no one

A) There is no hive mind. That's just you perceiving a bunch of people who happen to hold a similar opinion as a monolith, and that's an illusion. You have no data whatsoever to support the idea that they're thinking in concert or even have the same reasons for their reactions.
Don't take it so personally. They don't know you, and they're not attacking you by downvoting you. They're simply expressing "I want to see less of this."
d) Instead of having a kneejerk reaction when you get this kind of response and immediately being defensive, step back and use it as a reflective moment. Maybe you misjudged the room, misinterpreted the potential impact of what you posted, or are simply on a different track from those who downvoted. What can you learn from it? Do you need to change your own approach, or do you need to reevaluate your audience?
- Buzz McCallister, is that you?
- I'm not sure how you can claim there is no hivemind. it's been a well known fact masses tend to do that. but even ignoring that, I was talking about another phenomenon, where one downvotes brings to another 10 for no reason other than that the downvote was there, which is a pretty common occurrence on reddit. as for d, i thought about that, couldn't think of anything, except for the political stuff, which I already mentioned. I already said this, because I was hoping to get useful feedback, which completely did not happen.

I’ve only skimmed your comments, but I think a factor is also that a lot of them are really hard to read.
Examples I see are weird sentence structure, the lack of paragraphs for longer messages, the lack of capitalisation, and rather odd/hyperbolic use of words (writing in the same way you’d speak?). This “style” just gets interpreted as “noise” when I’m reading it, which will get downvoted as it doesn’t contribute.
English isn’t my first language either (it’s not even my second or third!) so I understand it’s very hard to get these things right. But without sufficient clarity you will get downvotes, as it just comes off as noise.
- I understand, that makes sense. I have a really hard time with good sentence structure
  
  It really is. Luckily it’s a skill that can be trained.

Who do you think is coming over from reddit. aliens? Cows? It's humans bro, you're going to have the same problems as long as it revolves around people and their relationship.
Somehow lemmy is supposed to represent something different while being made up of the same people? This is kind of a silly point to be questioning
- Sad to hear the aliens won't be joining us.
- bro
  I thought we were done with this shit a decade ago, when the internet became so ubiquitous that even my grandmother started using forums and posting on Reddit.
  
  chill, bro

I went through some of your comments to see. The most recent ones where you said that the who categorized meet as bad as plutonium is not exactly right… it put it in the same category as plutonium, but didn’t say it was “as bad” when it comes to causing cancer. Some of your comments are awkwardly phrased and wordy with odd punctuation, sometimes people just get weird about that sort of thing. Obviously your most downvoted comment in recent is about Ukraine and any time you speak a strong opinion on Ukraine and Russia and what not who knows…could be a whole bunch of people from other places coming in to down vote because of political ideology. There are a lot of people on Lemmy with pro-Russia leanings.
Some of your comments that are downvoted to negative 2 or 3 do seem to be for no reason that I can see. 🤷🏻‍♂️
- the "as bad" was an oversimplification I made over there, but guess I'm not surprised at that one.
  
  A lot of your comments come off as passive aggressive or snarky, to be honest, man. Including this one. I took several minutes to look and gave you some thoughts. Sometimes it’s not what you say but how you say it. If you want to say something smart and not care if people like it or not don’t worry about the downvotes. If you do care…change up your phrasing to show people you are listening and offering something constructive.

Sometimes you say things that go down well, sometimes not. If you only ever experience approval in your life, you are doing something wrong.

you should try https://goblin.tools/Judge
- how this works? chatGPT?
  very cool btw
  
  yeah, I read that it's running on OpenAIs services for now. It has a lot of neat features

I agree that the downvotes on your posts in the Jerboa community are rather strange. My theory is that people who downvote your more controversial stuff subsequently go through your whole profile and just downvote everything regardless of content.
- I think the Jerboa ones are for asking questions that have been asked multiple times before

Sometimes, hypothetically, you post cringe. It's ok, I post cringe sometimes too

I suppose somebody, who didn't like what you posted at one point, went through the trouble of down voting all your comments/posts regardless if their content.
- might've happened, I guess

My experience on Lemmy has been greatly improved by turning off downvotes. It's not worth the mental energy.
- Unfortunately, turning off downvotes for yourself does not turn it off for others. You'll get little to no discussion if no one sees your comment.
  
  Right - but then I don't spend the mental energy thinking about the score. I leave my comment and then move on.

I'm not sure, but I guess there is no real way to address this until we have public downvotes as on Kbin.
- Yes, hopefully that comes to Lemmy too

It's rare to feel like downvoting every post on a user's profile. But when it happens, the person is always a piece of shit. I saw some people saying that you are a fascist. If true, that's the reason you're getting the downvotes, it's because you're a piece of shit.
- If you go on a right wing instance, you will get downvoted for having left wing opinions. Just like you do for having right wing opinions. Downvotes don't mean anything
  
  There are right wing instances? Do they have goofy names like lemmyright.net
- I'm not even sure what I'm doing to be a fascist tbh
  
  He said "if true"
  Personally after a quick 10 second scroll of your profile you seem like a curious but chill guy 🤷‍♂️
  It could be that you're posting stuff to the wrong-but-similar communities/a particular community could be a bit hostile towards some viewpoints/not reading sidebar rules before posting
  
  You gotta realize that being fascist has nothing to do with 1930s Italy. Its to do with name calling those whose views are to the right of Marx. And thats only slight hyperbole on Lemmy.

It would help if everyone tried to interpret other people's comments in the best possible way, rather than in the worst possible way. It leads to much more interesting discussions.
Unfortunately, that is very unlikely to happen.

Yes because this isn't a reddit phenomenon but a human psychology phenomenon

Welcome to the internet! We have bots and people who act like bots.
In all seriousness though, I think that this is just a flaw in the voting system and human behaviour. People like to go with the general concensus instead of thinking for themselves. It feels like people genuinely have difficulty in thinking about things and act as automatons a lot of the time. I also have a suspicion that bots are involved but I don't have any evidence though it does seem to be a theory that has circulated on the internet for some time.

It's changed in a matter of a week or so. I can't even believe the drop in quality contribution. It's actually made me upset. I was so excited, with such sound discourse. But I'm just seeing:
This. What he said. This is the way.
Etc.
Very. Very. Disappointed.
- I definitely agree. In just a matter of days Lemmy has fallen to almost Reddit-like quality and I don’t see what could have caused it, there wasn’t a huge spike in users. It’s really weird
  
  I was going to say days, but felt it was just me. Literally in days, the shitposts have started. What a shame.
  
  There was an increase in users when the Sync app went live (a few days ago). So, absent of any other evidence, I'm blaming them.

I feel like there's an equal amount of people being stinkers + people trying to remind others to be chill/happy to not be on reddit and trying promote positivity. At least that's my perception of what I've experienced

You can see your “karma” with the lemmy client Memmy.

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.

Consciousness is wild. I'm pretty sure I can feel all of you in my head, for sure.

Which posts are you thinking of? I looked at your history, only one post appears to be in the negative, and that's in c/support which to me suggests you might be posting an already discussed problem.
- I had already looked for such a question to avoid duplicates. it also seems looking at accounts from other instances changes how you see the voting
  
  The question you asked was pretty similar to this one:
  https://lemmy.world/post/1674334 which had been asked a couple days prior.
  And my guess is that vote counts from different instances should look different depending on which instances each has federated/defederated with.

Not quite as bad as Reddit I once said I had A Huawei phone and liked it there and I was forced to delete the comment because of downvoted.
Classic case of daring to speak your own opinion against the hive.
- You weren't forced to delete it, you deleted it due to cowardice and unwillingness to stand by your statement.
  
  I was at about -60 or so 30 min In, it would have ruined my karma completely to let it keep existing.
  On Reddit people only see see the downvote and jump on. There's no chance of people giving it even a read they just join the swarm.

I don't see the point of voting on online content, and just ignore the feature entirely. My brain automatically edits out the voting buttons and results. I don't even see them!
Without offense intended... I didn't come here for your (or anyone's) approval. Other people's opinions have universally baffled me as a general rule (yours probably will too).
I came here to document my radical opinions about assembly language programming, post photos of stuff I build, occasionally help other people build stuff, and (of least concern) occasionally participate in conversation. I imagine very few people (other than myself) care about anything I have to say -- it's still a neat exercise to put it into words so I better define what I think.
So maybe people are downvoting you because they don't like you, or don't like what you write. Maybe they do it for no reason, or for fun. Maybe I don't like you, for an arbitrary or a good reason, or both. At some point I guess we just have to be comfortable with these things I guess and coexist here somehow. At least you can't pay money to a platform, to force me to read your opinions, I guess! That would be torture.
Anyway, no one actually needs to worry about me not liking them or username-stalking them. The depths of my indifference are fathomless, and eternal. To make me care about what you think is like bridging the void between the stars.
- You can hide post and comment votes on many Lemmy clients. Try it. I can assure, you will sleep a little bit better
  
  My mind automatically filters them out already. It's really weird. Sort of like banner-blindness.
  Like, I know they're physically there, and I can see them if I stop and willfully look for them. Otherwise all I see are the words and the buttons though.
- You are still affected by this. Upvoted posts and comments tend to show up earlier in your feed (except if you're sorting strictly by new). Some instances may even decide to auto-hide content below a certain threshold. So a politically motivated group or even just a person with a significant enough bot-army could manipulate post visibility and kinda soft-shadow-ban people they deem unfavorable.
  
  One of the answers to have a 'controversial' or 'bottom' sort order for posts and comments
  
  OK, I'll give you that. I don't really use the whole feed thing often, and that didn't occur to me. It doesn't seem to be a problem so far, though.
  If that changes, I'll write a Lemmy reader that strips out the democratic elements and just sorts by newest for me (if someone else doesn't do it first). Probably less work than managing an army of Lemmy bots. I wrote and manage just one -- a fortune teller that lives on my instance and does I-Ching readings.
  Do other people use the feed a lot? I haven't really used social media prior to Lemmy. A lot of what people consider important comes off as a bit alien to me.

100% there's a hivemind. That's why I joined lemmy.one, downvotes are disabled to try and stop hivemind downvotings and encourage discussion. On local communities it works well, if only more of the bigger federations disabled them too.

I was just talking with chatGPT about this. I know I say controversial things and all but I still try to always be respectful and I don't say things I don't believe just to get a reaction. I genuinely try to bring some nuance in the discussions I read but sometimes it truly feels like pissing in the wind. Here you get downvoted for saying you use twitter in a thread about what social media platforms you use and sometimes just stating facts that anyone can google still gets you downvoted.

I can't believe that you'd make this post then be dumb enough to admit to being a /r/PCM user. Thanks fascist, I'm glad you aren't comfortable here.
- Yes fascism is bad, but you don't change minds and have productive conversation with aggressive language.
- Give him some slack, he's young. At least I assume so.
- I see we're resorting to accusing of fascism again

- your going to be so upset when you find out who made the software lmao
- Cry more

@6mementomori
Voting is garbage. It's a cancer on all these type sites. Deciding the value of a post only requires basic literacy, and someone else's opinion is irrelevant. I only upvote posts as a reward to the author. It isn't for anyone else. Others should read the post and decide for themselves what value it has.
- +1
  
  If someone writes a well worded, well thought out opinion that I disagree with what is the proper way to respond? Up vote because it's a high quality comment? Down vote because I disagree? Reply with my own comment? What if my opinion is already expressed in another comment thread already?
- Voting is a good thing. People need to hear that their opinion or their post is garbage, twitter and Facebook only allow you to leave positive signals which leads to people having over inflated ideas of self worth
- It satisfies a human desire so that's why they retain voting.
  Much prefer old school bulletin forums where you just comment and nasty comments are removed and you may even get a ban.
  
  At a infrastructure level the voting system is distributed content moderation. So that you don't have to rely on a core group of moderators to flag bad content

126 comments