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Anyone else had problems with downvoting bots? (self.main)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by jballs to c/main

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Earlier today I made a comment that someone must have found controversial, because I noticed that all of my posts and most of my comments made in the last month have received about a dozen downvotes each, all happening today. Has anyone experienced anything similar and is there anything that can be done to combat that sort of thing from happening? I think that reddit used to only shadow downvote when voting from a user's profile. I'm assuming Lemmy isn't that advanced yet.

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[–] gravitas_deficiency 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So like… you can only vote on a comment if you reply to it…?

Might be an interesting concept to play with if it can be done on a test instance (if that exists), but I don’t know if lemmy has the flexibility to do something like that. Even if it does, I would also expect changing the vote mechanism that fundamentally would pretty much break instance federation.

[–] FigMcLargeHuge 3 points 1 year ago

Now that's an interesting twist that I like. Not sure how it will go over based on the reactions I got with my suggestion. My idea was hatched when I was seeing what felt like bot farms just downvoting certain posts to oblivion. And I know this is going to sound all feel good, hokey shit, but I thought 'if people had to think twice before downvoting' maybe it would be a good thing overall. But as we can see, it's not a very popular idea. It would also be like a captcha, without having to get those stupid things involved.

I guess thinking about this, another thought is, what if we just programmed in an option so that you can just turn off the display of votes. I know for a fact that even some imaginary points can have an effect on your mental health so maybe the solution is to just give people the option to hide them. Or how about just hiding them altogether. Maybe someone with some training in psychology can give some input on a better system that this simple up/down voting that would possibly be better for the population as a whole. Regardless, I like your idea too.