Some accounts are deleting their posts after a few downvotes. It’s devastating on communities like c/asklemmy.
Lemmy doesn’t track an account’s karma like reddit. So, all downvotes will be isolated to your post or comment and won’t affect your account—unless you wrote something truly horrible.
Remember lemmy is a community effort. Deleting a post also removes all comments on it. So you are not only robbing the effort others put in, you are actively removing knowledge from the fediverse. Others won’t be able to find it through search and lemmy will seem lonelier than it already is.


Don’t delete your stuff over downvotes ever. Say what you mean and mean what you say and if some people don’t like that oh well. The need for universal validation is killing human discourse
Being authentic means not everyone is going to like or agree with you all the time, it’s a good thing
Well, you can say stupid shit and only realize it after you already posted it.
In those situations it’s better to just edit the comment so people can still read the stupid shit with the context that the commenter doesn’t believe in the stupid shit anymore.
You saying I’m posting stupid shit without realising it?Edit : you weren’t talking about me at all my bad
And this is how you handle realising that you just posted stupid shit. You keep the the stupid shit but you also acknowledge your mistake in an edit.
Good job accidentally modeling good behaviour
“accidentally”
My solution to that is to downvote my own comment. Happened once or twice
A lot of the time people downvote stuff because it’s already downvoted.
A few times I’ve posted a reply in reddit and gotten downvoted hard. Then I post the EXACT same comment to the same post a 2nd time as an experiment. It gets upvoted hard. I have to guess that it is a monkey mind response, people do what they see other people do automatically. They see the mob throwing rocks so they figure they should toss a rock. I also wonder if people who respond to a post earlier are more likely to downvote than people coming in later.
Just dont up/downvote period. Its malignant cancer growing in human interaction.
This gamification of human discourse is one of the leading reasons we’ve seen opinions and positions polarize and extremify over the years, because of a dopamine addiction fueled feedback loop of saying the right thing and getting massive upvotes for it, and the feedback bubbles it inevitably creates.
To the point that people skip the entire conversation and just assume upvote = right and downvote = wrong, and vote en-masse without having to think, read, or develop any analytical skill or social ability.
But the internet has an endless stream of garbage that isn’t worth your time. Would you prefer an opaque algorithm controlled by someone else to sort things for you? The transparency of fediverse voting is refreshing and the least bad option.
… Just use the damn scroll wheel and scroll down, bro.
Hell, most the garbage on the internet only exists because of these gamification mechanisms anyway, get rid of those and theres no need to farm the shit with garbage posts.
I automate things that take 5 seconds to do. Why would I want to spend more time looking for reasonable, thoughtful, or funny posts. The system isn’t perfect, but I think it’s better than nothing
Ah yes, Why exert effort when you can be shovel fed your thoughts and opinions based on groupthink that ever further distorts and destroys actual human discourse.
I want to be able to hide these metrics. If other people want to see them, that’s fine. But I’ve noticed my experience improving on any platform when I hide pretty much all metrics.
It solves nothing to just selectively hide them.
Its an all or nothing game.
Get rid of them or embrace the continual decline of human interaction and the gamification and extremity of opinion and thought.
Yup. And it pushes alternate views down to the bottom of discussions where they are hidden. On reddit those that reflect the acceptable view of the echo chamber get highlighted. Those that question it get collapsed and buried.
And people never read them, because the up/down vote system pushes them to the bottom, so they never realize how poignant or relevant they may be, but that wont stop them from trying to be part of the in group by blindly downvoting the already mass downvoted.
Action without thought
Sometimes, we say a thing we meant, but then later we learn a new thing or our perspective on an issue changes. That old post/comments can feel quite embarrassing or shameful, and removing it (or editing the original content out) can feel like the only way to still feel like you belong. If the choice is between removing one piece of your history here, or removing yourself from the community, the one piece feels like the superior choice. IF that’s the alternative.
Some people (I see this on reddit a lot) will go through your comment history and use it to shoot the messenger.
Is anyone actually doing this though? A significant number?
How do you know?
But don’t post misinformation or break rules. That’s the only reason for downvotes anyway
Down votes are for whatever the person down voting wants it to be. There is no one reason
No. We have lemmyquite. Down votes are not, for example, for “I disagree”
I’m glad you learned something today about this platform
I disagree. And my down vote reflects that :)
I’ve reported you for spreading misinformation
Don’t do that.
Do your job.
Someone being wrong is not spreading misinformation. Grow up, I’m not a babysitter.
It would only be misinformation if I actually liked your comment but hit the dislike button. Which I can promise is not the case
Most downvotes are because someone doesn’t agree with you.
If that were true, we have a lot of work on our hands to educate users on this site. A banner message at the top of every page once day per month might help.
Or a bot run by the admin that sends DMs to someone when the put their first down vote on new accounts.