this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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Just as i had set up my tent she came in, was raining outside. We've been hanging out here for half an hour already. I hope she won't spike my sleeping pad. Necklace says her name is Kyra. Love it ๐Ÿฅน

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[โ€“] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I'm looking into it using data from my instance to check it isn't an abuse issue.

What I know so far:

  1. It is a lemmy.world user.
  2. That user has downvoted 548 comments, and upvoted 18. Downvoted 557 posts and upvoted 25.
  3. Timing: the downvoting has been going on for some time, it isn't a new thing. 71 downvoted comments since 2024-06-01T00:00:00Z, 212 since the start of May (out of 548).
  4. The user has two comments ever, and no posts. One comment, on a thread about the actions of a right-wing American politician, said "Click bait lemmy for sure". This could imply the downvotes are legitimate and coming from having an impossibly high standard for what is considered quality here, or perhaps they are related to political grudges. I'm going to look further for patterns in the downvotes. I think a bot could have done far more downvotes - so it could just be a human.
[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Also could be someone that responds to negative posts/reactions more and just lurks. I used to be that way in early days of reddit. Most of my votes were downvotes with very few upvotes given out. As I got a bit older I kind if quit giving much of a shit, and now I seek out positive posts instead of looking for negative shit all the time.

Either way votes are even more futile on lemmy. They barely have any impact on anything and it's not like the threads here reach the thousands of comments where a relatively few votes would bury a comment. There's also no karma so it's even less impactful. I personally think it's good that way but whatever. To each their own!

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Either way votes are even more futile on lemmy. They barely have any impact on anything and it's not like the threads here reach the thousands of comments where a relatively few votes would bury a comment. There's also no karma so it's even less impactful. I personally think it's good that way but whatever. To each their own!

One of my favorite things about Lemmy. I love that the fake internet points have no real impact and karma farming is not incentivized. On Reddit and SO, it was a good idea to try to give something to judge authenticity on but, like everything else, people found ways to game it for nefarious purposes. Overall, I think the experiment showed that karma points do more harm than good.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

So actual hunan downvote bots do exists. I've always wondered but never had the opportunity to check.