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.
Kbin doesn’t federate downvotes from Lemmy. If you look at their Lemmy profile, you can see there are many seemingly innocuous comments with 5-20 downvotes: https://sh.itjust.works/u/jballs?page=1&sort=New&view=Comments
The web-ui doesn’t seem to show downvotes and upvotes separately anymore, but many of those totals around -1 or whatever are the sum of 10-20 upvotes and downvotes. There’s definitely a weird amount of downvoting hitting that account on comments that seem… ok at least.
@jballs@sh.itjust.works there was another report of mass downvoting on Lemmy.world: https://lemmy.world/post/2343398 I’d say it’s too early to tell if these are true cases of individuals or groups sockpuppeting many accounts to mass downvotes or if someone is just attracting random downvotes for some reason. The other poster had an annoying flashy gif profile photo and banner that might have been annoying people. If you have something about your account, or have been antagonistic to people in comments/DMs that’s another likely explanation.
It was definitely this comment that spawned the activity. https://sh.itjust.works/comment/1661162
I initially made the comment, got a couple quick initial downvotes due to my mistake thinking it was a quote from Reddit CEO Spez. I added an edit to clarify that I was mistaken, and then came back a few hours later to find that all of my posts and previous submissions were, like you said, about 5-20 points lower than they were before.
Kind of disappointing honestly. Not that I’m a karma whore, but because I’ve been making lots of posts in the !buildapcsales@lemmy.ml community to try to get it off the ground, and I assume that having a community full of downvoted posts isn’t going to help.
This sounds to me like sockpuppeted profile stalking and downvoting. I’m going to try reporting your comment with a note that while the comment itself is ok, the material it describes warrants an admin investigation into sockpuppeted voting. Instance admins mod this community, and hopefully they have time to take a look. Given that there are several credible reports of this kind of thing now, it seems worth an admin checking out.
Cool thanks, we’ll see how it works out. Just hoping a busy admin doesn’t see the initial part that is a quote that I was reacting to and immediately bans me out of reflex.
I think you’ll be ok. The comment I reported is the one I replied to, not the one in the Swartz thread. There’s nothing naughty in your comments in this thread, so admin will have to read and click before even encountering your Swartz comment and will at that point be primed to investigate sockpuppeting rather than content policing. They’re also pretty chill here, I haven’t stumbled on anything in your history that would lead me to be concerned about them finding you to be at fault for this situation or otherwise an abusive user.
Sounds good. Appreciate it!
Honest question, if you pinpointed that person and blocked them, could they still downvote you?
I don’t know the answer to this question, maybe someone else will chime it. If I were to guess though, typically things that “disable downvoting” on Lemmy simply ignore it and fail to display it, which is consistent with how blocking and defederation handle other things.
For example, Beehaw has defederated with Lemmy.world where my account is. I can still see Beehaw posts to communities on other instances though. I can reply to those posts, and people on other instances see my comments. The Beehaw commenter cannot though, it’s a sort of see-no-evil-hear-no-evil situation, but the evil is still out there for everyone else. I believe blocking works the same way for comments, it’s a one-way block on your side… they still see you and can interact with your stuff in ways that others can see, unless I’m mistaken.
I’d expect blocking yo interact similarly with downvotes if it interacts at all. But I’m not positive.
Admins can definitely do more though, like banning/deleting the sockpuppet accounts.
Thank you for taking the time to explain. I hope we see a solution to these things.
In my laptop I use voyager and opted for the option to hide votes. Though that solution is just for me, lemmy will still see the votes and relegate and rank my comments accordingly. If someone mas downvotes me then my comment or posts will still be buried.