I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question
Isn’t the Fediverse supposed to be open?
You can show your personal support for something by upvoting it or your opposition to something by downvoting it, but if you don’t want to take a stance on something at all, you don’t have to.
It’s an entirely optional mechanic. You can fully utilize Lemmy to view, post, and comment without ever voting if you don’t want to.
As far as I’m aware, the votes don’t really matter, anyway. Lemmy doesn’t seem to use karma the way that Reddit does. i.e. I’ve never seen a post removed because the user didn’t have enough karma, etc.
The real question is why do we even need upvotes or down votes at all?
On other platforms, it’s a mechanism to assign a sort of “social worth” to people and ideas, and to tailor an algorithm to drive engagement.
I think it exists on Lemmy purely to make it feel more like “Reddit but federated.” Without the votes, this is just a normal message board. Lol
There are communities on certain instances that have auto-moderators that take into account upvotes to ban/unban people.
Piefed also by default collapses any comment that has a negative vote. if the comment gets downvoted even further, it can even be shadowbanned by being hidden from anyone on Piefed. although you can change that or opt out, if you prefer to see every shitty take. Piefed also places bright warning icons next to the names of anyone with a bad rep. there’s quite a lot of personal control over what you see if you use Piefed.
Interesting! Not something I’ve encountered, but I suppose that’s what makes the Fediverse special! We can all control how we want to interact with things.
I agree - I was just surprised to be confronted publicly by a user, for down voting a post. Not that I didn’t want to be exposed, but that people actually could look it up
Oh, 100% agree that it’s a bit unhinged to actively call out people because they down-dooted something you posted.
I don’t make it a habit to check, but it has been fun to check and call out in precisely two scenarios.
Way too much text about stupid shit
One comment thread that had devolved into an angry back and forth pretty deep in a multiple day old thread where I started seeing multiple downvotes on all of my posts. The user was using their “abandoned” alts across multiple instances. Then he accused me of doxxing him. That was… definitely an experience. Sad to say that according to admins the user was actually doxxed by some fuckstain.
Another comment thread where I was asking someone to provide a source for their claim that Windows’s Typing and Handwriting feature was a full on keylogger stealing passwords from all input on the machine. Kept telling me that the hundreds of copy pasted tech support slop articles making the claim (with no analysis/packetcapture/etc info to back it up) with instructions on how to disable it were proof. Claiming they weren’t in the habit of spoonfeeding something so quick and easy to find, despite wasting time with multiple medium length replies to me where I was asking them to stop grandstanding and just link it. I offered them a bet to pretty much nuke this account or edit every comment on it into singing their praises if they just fucking provided what he clearly must have had, and had claimed was so damn easy to find that I must have been lying about looking into it myself. They downvoted me and fucked off.
By the way, that bet’s still open to anyone so inclined, just find the original comment for the specific details. Looking for actual cybersecurity style evidence of this specific setting working that way in “prod” releases of Win 7-11, and not for anything related to the trash fire that is Recall. It’s an understatement to call Microsoft a garbage fire, but I’ve also gotten tired of seeing a lot of false stuff being parroted as fact simply because it fits “Microsoft bad”. We don’t need to make shit up to prove that.