Hello, not sure if this is the right place to ask, but is anyone else being massively downvoted on every comment? I noticed this started happening after the DDOS attacks on lemmy.world. If you check my profile, you’ll see what I’m talking about. Almost as soon as I post a comment it’s at -10, etc.
Have I pissed off someone, or is it a possible bot attack? I try to keep most of my comments cordial, which is why this is confusing me. Thanks.
They are and they aren’t. They’re not meaningless when you’re trying to find actual information and a legitimate helpful comment is buried or disregarded because that account is being targeted by a downvote bot brigade. That actively hurts the community.
It’s why YouTube removing visible dislikes was so bad. It makes it impossible to quickly assess whether a how-to video is legitimate or full of misinformation and mistakes.
I guess if someone is operating under the premise “what is popular is correct” they would find value in votecounts. I dunno, I might browse weird though; I dont read community names, usernames or look at vote count.
I always saw votes as being for the entity (YouTube, Reddit etc) so they can serve up what’s popular to users so they’re more attractive to users.
Again, lemmy is rarely active enough for comments to be banished and all of which is ignoring the fact that the numbers are meaningless just migrate.
And a lot of people do because it works well enough in a lot of use cases. Recipes, parts recommendations, repairs, DIY, etc. A like/dislike system is pretty crucial in hobby communities. Somebody recommending a brake pad that has a significant failure rate that is well known by some people of the community, but not being able to see the 500 dislikes vs 20 likes might cause you buy and install those pads and crash because you only saw the 20 likes and assumed it was probably fine. These things are important to a lot of people.
That’s a very shortsighted view and the numbers aren’t meaningless just because you don’t look at them. They serve a purpose to a lot of people.
All roads lead to the same end though: migrate. If you care about your comment numbers migrate and the downvotes stop. Account numbers don’t grant you any special treatment so migrate because you don’t lose anything. Accounts are free and your score means nothing, just migrate.
This very much seems an argument for arguments’ sake.
Look you were the one that came into a thread on a specific instance support community and started arguing against votes mattering or not and I gave you some reasons why they might. They can migrate sure, but your first instinct when something breaks or something bad happens shouldn’t be “well screw it, pack it up and go elsewhere” it should be “trouble shoot it and try to fix it”. If nothing else works then migrating is probably a legitimate course of action.
Except you came to me and didn’t do any of those things that you said that you should. That’s fine, this is unproductive, I’m gonna go now.