5mo ago

To those who downvote your own comments… Why?

I’ve occasionally noticed ordinary comments with zero upvotes to them. Yet, our own comments are upvoted automatically whenever we make them. So for comments to have zero upvotes, either something I don’t know about is happening, or there are people who downvote their own contributions.

I can’t help but wonder, why? It seems like extra effort without a clear reason.

22 comments

Will test and edit. Ill leave my automatic upvote on, so first person to read this please downvote this comment
Edit: no no guys, stop upvoting 🤣
Edit 2: sorry OP, guess i cant test out my theory, which was that if you leave your upvote, but get downvoted once, it shows up as 0
- Accept our love.
- Ha ha! No.
- Most clients can show split votes. So a 0 upvote is different to 1up 1down.
  On that note, not a single person downvoted your comment 🥲
My suspicions are that the post with no votes are not from other Lemmy instances, but rather from other federated platforms.
- Mbin defaults to 0 by default, have to upvote manually.
Accidental? A wayward tap.
As others have mentioned, mbin doesn't auto-upvote. I didn't even know that Lemmy does apparently. Seems like something that really ought to be standardized across platforms, because now it feels like mbin is at a 'disadvantage'.
IMO, ideally you just shouldn't be able to vote on your own posts/comments at all.
People on Mbin and Kbin do not automatically upvote their own posts. I would guess at least some of those posts were because of that.
If one person down votes, will a comment not have zero points?
- Some instances (kbin.earth in my case, which runs on mbin) show upvotes and downvotes separately. Your comment looks like this to me
  
  My question answered 🙂
Sometimes I realize a comment is dumb or off-topic. Deletion is the coward's way.
I have noticed that I sometimes accudentaly swipe to vote on a comment when trying to scroll, the most common is to remove the upvote.
This happens on Voyager
Some clients allow the self auto-upvote to be set to off.
Does kbin/mbin do self auto upvoting?
- Nope. This is the first I've heard of auto upvotes.
- It does not
I can't remember which ones exactly; but I know I've seen a few people mention apps that don't upvote by default.
I don't think it's a conscious effort to remove the automatic upvote.
Though I have on rare occasion realized I said something stupid and just downvoted my post/comment instead of outright deleting it. Maybe someone will learn something from my stupidity.
I only do it when I wanna screenshot something and see it has 70, 43, or 421 upvotes. Or if I'm sending it to a friend who has a lucky number and my comment is one vote higher
Accidentally or for some of them sweet, sweet sympathyUpvotes
If I post a comment and someone afterward posts a better comment that renders mine superfluous, I’ll usually delete my comment to give the better one more visibility. But if someone has already replied to my comment, I’ll leave it for the sake of context, but downvote it to make sure people see the better comment first.

22 comments