i’ve seen quite a few users with one downvote on every single comment for no reason and it makes me wonder if people are disagreeing, stalking users, or just a weird bot account.
It seems off and on, I routinely have one downvote show up on every thing, including totally benign “hahah cute cat” type comments, or comments that are otherwise well received.
It started happening after I criticized Israel for genocide. (Specifically around the time that there was that giant missile barrage right at the start of the Israeli response.)
Checking my recent comments it seems to be off at the moment.
I used the tool and it looks like I have a downvoting stalker that dutifully downvotes my posts and comments. Aww… that’s so cute!
Noticed this a while back. The anti Israel sentiment could be it. We know Israeli parasites are scraping the internet to doxx people so it would make sense they are tagging people they IDes for some data gathering purposes
Users with one downvote on every recent comment/post is usually some other user raging and being incapable of accepting other people’s opinions.
I think we have a few knuckleheads who think it improves the algorithm and don’t realize that Lemmy doesn’t work that way.
i.e. meh, not my type of post. I don’t care about trains. Downvote! Similar idea with comments thinking somehow it will show them better comments.
I sooner attribute this to ignorance rather than malice.
The votes are public but inaccessible in UI. You can check them.
I made this tool to check votes on a comment/post, and I am working on an option to see all votes a user has cast
Now, this is interesting. As far as I know, all of the public threadiverse softwares specifically hide this info (especially downvotes), while acknowledging that the way ActivityPub works, the information is public anyway and you’re really just making it slightly less accessible. An open service like this essentially removes all of the supposed barriers (e.g. “Most users don’t know how to set up their own instance in order to see downvotes.”) which are claimed to keep this info private.
What kind of effect does knowing exactly which people downvoted you have on a platform? Is there a chilling effect on downvotes, is there revenge downvoting? I guess we’ll find out. It’s less easy to see the upsides of knowing this info, beyond being able to confirm whether or not you’re being stalked by persistent downvoters.
@lena@gregtech.eu Did you have any particular thoughts around the ethics of this tool when you decided to make and share it? Not trying to call you out in any way, just interested to hear how you feel about it. Ultimately, if it wasn’t you it would be somebody else, so the direct impact is probably negligible.
Thanks for the question, I believe the illusion of privacy is worse than the lack of privacy. Currently, non-technical users or newbies think that their votes are private, which they are definitely not. Someone could spin up an instance and see the votes, which users cast without thinking about how private they really are.
I will also write a blog post about this tool and its ethics.
What kind of effect does knowing exactly which people downvoted you have on a platform? Is there a chilling effect on downvotes, is there revenge downvoting? I guess we’ll find out.
It’s not like we haven’t had public downvoting in the fediverse yet. We already found out in the past.
Kbin had public downvotes and the main effect was that people put more thought into their downvotes. While I assume it wasn’t without abuse, I’ve never seen it brought up as an active problem, just something that could theoretically happen.
Thanks, this is a really handy tool. Kniwing the information was being withheld ‘just because’ was really rankling me. Now, could you just add a quick feature to read their minds and tell me why they down voted me? ;)
Clients couldn’t add it, they would need admin access to do so
Huh, may I see the URL you used? And did you select the proper option (post/comment)?
Nice! Any chance you could have it filter by community? Would be useful as a mod to see who’s downvoting a lot in a comm
It doesn’t seem to be working for me; I’ve tried several posts on different instances and they all result in a 500 error from your API.
I’ve checked several posts with one dv. Only one hasn’t worked so far, which is weird, because it stemmed from the same instance as several others. There is one user showing up from lemme.ee several from .world, and an odd other instance, here and there. I’m wondering if the one that didn’t show up was some magazine mod’s protection against it?
Pretty sure it’s just users that disagree going and downvoting latest comments. At least for me, there was a MAGAt that didn’t like anti-trump stuff and gave me 1 downvote on everything I posted from that single comment, on backwards in my history for about a week or so.
I thought it was a bot at first, but then I realized it started right after my comment replying to him correcting him on his conspiracy theory stupidity cult nonsense. Everything posted after that comment received no downvotes.
