Anyone else had problems with downvoting bots?

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.

38 comments

It's not dozens, it's one user. You can see the user by picking any if your reduced comments and selecting 'activity.'
Apparently you pissed off a user spirited-pirate on kbin.social. They reduced all your comments an hour ago.
Hope this helps!
- 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.
  
  Honest question, if you pinpointed that person and blocked them, could they still downvote you?
  
  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.
- I don't see the 'activity' button - which one is it? Do I need to use an app for that?
  
  Its only on kbin
  
  It’s on kbin. I don’t think lemmy has one.
Stop caring about votes in general, it's bad for your mental health. If anything focus on replies and discussions you spark as that is far more meaningful engagement.
- I mentioned in a comment below that I'm trying to get the !buildapcsales@lemmy.ml community going and am by far the top contributor over there. So by making half the posts on the sub into negative score, it's kind of shitty. Basically has the ability to kill a community. Was hoping someone could do something about it, but sounds like that's a downside of the fediverse. Could see this being abused in the upcoming election cycle.
A sampling of recent comments I’ve made, and the current (as of this writing) up/down counts:
explaining why overprescription of antibiotics is super dangerous because it can speed up the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of various pathogens: 2 up/4 down
explaining why I tend to have difficulty with making progress on personal software projects, because I am a software engineer, and at the end of the day, I don’t have the energy to do something that feels even tangentially like “more work”: 7 up/7 down
pointing out that even the most unrepentantly exploitative strip- mining of Luna for millennia would have a statistically negligible effect on tidal forces exerted on Earth, because the aggregate total of all material ever produced by humanity up until this moment is something like 10 or 11 orders of magnitude less than the mass of the moon: 6 up/6 down
replying to a meme I found amusing with the sensible chuckle gif: 4 up/6 down
commenting on a nuance of a character’s development in For All Mankind that I had not realized was making a pointed reference to a topic discussed in a topically-related post about real-life racial issues during the early days of NASA: 3 up/6 down
Oh, another one that seems comically suspicious:
a few sci-fi book series recommendations on a post specifically asking for sci-fi book series recommendations - notably, all of the series I recommend were also recommended by others as well, and those comments got minimal or zero downvotes: 19 up/19 down
And generally speaking, a LOT of (what I would think are) uncontroversial comments I’ve made lately are getting 7ish (though sometimes less) downvotes, but only if the post was made on specific instances - some get 0 or 1 downvotes. And I am just categorically excluding comments I’ve made on potentially contentious topics/posts, simply to try to limit input variables. I’m getting REALLY suspicious that there’s some sort of sketchy vote manipulation going on, and the federated aspect of lemmy might be hilighting that the inconsistent downvoting might be occurring due to (de)federation linkages between instances.
This is all conjecture at this point, but I intend to start digging into it this weekend (…if I can motivate myself sufficiently, of course) when I get back from traveling.
Also, I’m curious to see if this post gets the same treatment.
- That's interesting, but doesn't sound quite like the same issue I had. Mine was literally a dump of downvotes that hit all my past comments and posts (done within the last month) all delivered instantly. Or at least over the course of an hour or so.
  It definitely was a one time event where a pissed off user either manually logged into multiple alts to downvote my stuff from my profile page - or used a bot. I tend to think it was the former, because they were lazy and didn't do every comment/post I had, just stuff from the last month. Then again, it could have been a shitty bot that only did the first page of results.
  
  Oh, you’re getting downvoted on everything, not just posts on particular instances?
  But yes, I need to dig into the vote activity metadata - it’s just difficult (impossible?) to do that from Memmy, and I won’t be in a spot to actually check those details until the weekend.
  Tangentially, apart from the immediate effect of pushing my comments down, this sort of targeted downvoting is kinda funny to me, because it indicate that whoever is doing it doesn’t really understand how the lemmy ecosystem works (specifically, that karma is more or less irrelevant), despite whatever skill they might have in scripting.
I remember Lemmygrad once had a problem where a federated instance had allowed a bunch of bots to sign up, which then added around 1000 downvotes to the top posts on lemmygrad, IIRC. They defederated from that instance to solve the bot problem.
- Yeah, I’m suspicious that something loosely similar, though perhaps on a smaller/more fragmented scale might be occurring here. I’ve noticed some comments and posts that have identical upvotes and downvotes, which is… suspicious, to say the least.
  I’m definitely enjoying lemmy more than reddit, but there are definitely some bot and vote manipulation issues that will have to be addressed sometime soon.
same issue this week on my comments and posts.
how did it resolve in the end? Or does it still continue?
- I never got a resolution. Fortunately it only happened one time for me. Still it's a pain in the ass.
I have an idea about downvoting, and it seems like this would be the place to float it. What if when you downvoted something you had to fill out a box with the reason? I know that you can't hold people to this, but the thought here is to make downvoting more of a conscious decision than just click and move on.
- 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.
  
  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.
- No.
  
  Duly noted.
- Sure, if we also agree the same for upvotes. And we accept that the karma system is going to become useless or dominated by the fringe.
  
  Ok. I never said it was a great idea. LOL.
Maybe your opinion just isn't popular? Maybe you pissed someone off?
- Maybe you know something about it...
  
  Nope. Just assumptions. Also... Wow. 22 downvotes so far for my comment? Damn

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