I’ve posted some controversial stuff, and I understand why I would be getting down voted for that. But I see some of my posts and comments are in the negatives for seemingly no reason at all? I don’t really care about the karma because I can’t see it anyway, but I’m worried that comments and posts here are gonna get downvoted and dismissed without further consideration solely because of the negative score, like what would happen on reddit. I suspect someone, a troll, a bot, or a misclick downvoted my comment or post and people just followed along downvoting in turn. It’s either that, or I genuinely said something bad but I can’t figure for the life of me that it is indeed bad. My prime example is my support post for commenting under certain posts, why did that get the downvotes? And I see this kind of thing sometimes on other people’s comments as well, and I’m baffled, is it me who can’t understand why something is bad, or hive mind came here too?
EDIT: it seems i wasn’t clear enough. a) I’m not worried about getting the actual downvotes. I’m worried about downvotes stopping to be a tool to gauge content. b) I’m not worried about controversial opinions’ downvotes, I already said I’m not surprised I got downvoted there. I was talking about totally mundane posts, like that one support post. c) I’m not talking about people simply disagreeing, I’m talking about people immediately disregarding a post because of the downvote count. it’s not correct to say this doesn’t happen, it totally does and… how am I supposed to prove that? all it takes on reddit is see a comment on 0 for no reason and see it quickly drop to -5
I think that’s a little disengenuous. You can be concerned about the quality of conversation without wanting to play victim about it.
Even if you take away responses to the obvious alt-right bullshit and dogwhistles, Reddit absolutely had a hivemind problem and was largely unable to hold real discussions on any sub with any significant userbase.
Filtering what’s worthy of discussion from bait by people with no good faith can be hard, and for people who actually want to talk deeper about issues that require addressing controversial details, even if that’s in order to refute the bad-faith interpretation, will be more susceptible to being downvoted by people assuming bad faith.
If a more down-to-earth, small, approachable community that you can have deeper discussions with than most social media is what you came here for, I think it’s entirely justified to be disapointed if you’ve seen an uptick in dogmatic rhetoric that leaves out any room for those conversations.
Well that was an excellent, nuanced, comment - cheers. I have seen examples supporting OPs observation, but I’m too new to know if this is a change.