this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2021
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Asklemmy
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Someone seems to be stalking me and down-votes nearly all my posts (＞﹏＜)
But actually... I have the suspicion that some people here run alternative accounts to strawman etc. certain arguments, which in a few rare cases is understandable but in general just dishonest and a bad praxis.
We could find out who downvotes you, but it would be complicated and I'm not sure it would be a good idea.
Out of curiosity why would it be a potentially bad idea? Someone downvoted all of my replies to a controversial post I made in a thread immediately after I made the posts. I'm curious if it was the same person or multiple people. Complexity aside, would knowing who downvoted you encourage harassment of the voter? On discourse for example you can see who upvoted and downvoted you. On reddit this isn't the case.
People will mostly stop down-voting if it is easy to figure out who down-voted. And then you end up with up-votes only, similar to likes on other social networks. There is a lot to be said about pros and cons of either system, but giving people some popular feed-back that they might be on a wrong track has some benefits IMHO.
Eventually we'll add a user setting to hide scores, which would mitigate a lot of ppls anxiety about seeing scores / downvotes.
We had a similar idea in lemmur, though we were thinking about the bias it causes rather than the anxiety. But of course anxiety about scores is also a very valid reason to hide them. Therefore we will hold off with implementing it and wait for the official user setting to appear :)
That does make sense to do, we'll have a proper user setting for it.
From a reader perspective I find it to be more cathartic to downvote an idea i disagree with than educational as a post maker that my opinion is unpopular. Especially if someone indiscriminately starts downvoting be because of a grudge. If anything it makes me think "wow these people are ignorant." This is admittedly self-centered, but with anonymity on the internet, and a lot of the half-baked raw thoughts that get shared on forums like this, I get the perspective that's what most posters would feel like when they receive downvotes. I've certainly witnessed it on Lemmy where people make angry comments calling out downvoters for downvoting instead of replying with counterpoints. I agree with your points in theory but from a behavioural perspective I think anonymous downvoting might discourage courage to post new or controversial ideas.
Yeah maybe, but I also see a "wrong-way driver" effect. You know like the old joke about how the one driving thinks there are "hundreds of wrong-way drivers". So yeah the initial reaction is often “wow these people are ignorant”, but at some point it will trigger some introspection in most people (I hope).