if a user takes it upon themselves to painstakingly downvote everything i post..
are mods privy to this behavior and are there any tools at their disposal to combat bad faith 'brigading' as such?
Uncheck this box in your settings and move on to focus on things that actually matter.
Something along that^ line. The comments in this post are cringeworthy:
"it's abuse!" "omg brigading!" "admins can investigate and punish this vile perpetrator!" "evidence!"... 🤣
It's meaningless, unless you allow yourself to be bothered by it. The best part about Lemmy is Karma farming isn't a thing. In fact, take pride that someone hates you enough that their life has been reduced to pushing a button every time they see you.
Yes, admins can see all the votes.
You're kind of a downvote collector so it wasn't easy, but I didn't actually see all that much brigading. Seeing some repeat usernames and one occurrence that looks like someone did go through your profile and downvote most comments about a certain topic once, but that's all I could find. Most set of downvotes are confined to a given post.
You're really just getting downvoted a lot by a lot of different people. Your downvotes on this post have nothing in common with your other downvotes.
EDIT: Nevermind, there is indeed 2 people downvoting every comment from OP.
well it happened two times because every post for the last 12 hrs or so that had 0 downvotes suddenly had 2 and it happened because i have a less than popular understanding of the situation in ukraine.. happened a day or two back as well, but again its not of great concern where my up and downvotes rest, just good to know it can be confirmed one way or another.
The one user went way further back than 12h, I'm seeing it well into 3 weeks. That user hasn't downvoted this thread yet.
In the last 12 hours, this whole thread is the only thing on your profile that doesn't have at least 3 downvotes, most much more than that. There's only one repeat user across your entire profile, although you do have all your comments generally downvoted by the same users within a thread which isn't super unexpected.
There are a half dozen or so people that cause 90% of all negative behavior according to an admin on another instance. LW does not seem to take responsibility and act to stop these 0.0001% of bad users.
Mods can't see jack ****. Only admin see that info.
Unfortunately LW doesn't take updating the Lemmy version seriously either. The server version is WAY behind and the very next version of Lemmy adds the ability to turn off all negative votes at the user level. That single feature would likely improve the mental health of most LW users substantially.
Like everybody around here, I get random downvotes too but I've yet to see anyone harassing that poor downvote button against my previous messages (I would not be surprised if this changed right after I publish this comment).
A few times, I 've seen multiple posts of mine get downvoted in a row in some thread. I supposed it was the action of someone disagreeing with me and wanting to 'punish' me for our diverging opinions but I could not tell, and I don't care much either.
Much more than knowing someone may not like what I said, I'm interested in knowing their reasons why they disagree with what I said, or how I said it (even more so that I'm still learning English, so any remark can help me correct mistakes no matter how unpleasant the remark can be).
Alas, many people seem to think downvoting is enough an argument to say out loud they disagree with someone and to demonstrate how wrong they're. It is not, at least not for me. I don't know about them but I only write what I think, and what I think doesn't change with the direction of the wind, or with the amount of + or - votes it receives. It can change when I'm faced with convincing arguments.
But arguments require a tad more work to share than just hitting the downvote button. Work not that many people seem to be willing to do.
This isn't Reddit. Karma points would matter if it was reddit because they stupidly make it where the less points you got, the harder it'll be to post anywhere. That isn't a thing on the fediverse, you can have -1000 and still post.
It's just a stupid internet toy.
It's something that an instance owner has visibility of.
I don't know if discovering who does this will help, since I don't believe that blocking that account by you will stop their voting behaviour.
It's something that appears to be pretty common.
I suspect that there are people who believe that every post should start at zero and have bots running to make it so.
You could start your own instance if you had the energy to go head to head with this, but I wouldn't bother.
Voting is really just a way to indicate how far off the reservation a post has strayed.
I don't think DVs matter all that much. Actual interaction (comments) is much more rewarding. I think DV are more about knowing reach—who has read a comment or post to interact with it. If you get no votes and no comments you might wonder if it's worth the effort if no one is seeing them.
Someone else suggested not showing DV separately, but I suggest the opposite. 10 UV and 8 DV look like only 2 UV but you actually had ten people like your post. So mine are split and I only really pay attention to UV. Particularly on the occasions when I know I'm saying something unpopular and I'm going to get DV, those UV are the folks who silently agree but maybe didn't want to take the heat for saying a thing.
Beyond that, if folks are responding to you with comments, even insightful disagreements, IMO that's a much more rewarding interaction.
And lastly, maybe look at your posting habits. If this is a big problem for you, it might be worth examining if there's something you ought to do differently.
not showing them separately would remove the information about how divided users opinions are about that post, post with 200+ and 100- would still look like 100+ which would convey wrong impression about users opinions. Its quite effective way to silence one side of the opinion pool.
Mods? No. Admins? Yes. But as even my own experience at the hands of the masses shows, that doesn't mean they'll take sides.
From what I've heard, admins can't really do anything about repeat offenders / downvote trolls because of something about scanning through databases or something. But then I also saw a post yesterday about how Friendica reveals the usernames of people who upvote and downvote, so it seems like that information is accessible in the API or framework of the Fediverse.
That information is in the database it isn't exposed via the api but if u run an instance u can query the database urself.
Just turn off voting, it's a net negative.
Can't agree. I mean, sure, people do abuse it, but it's a quick flag that something might be really wrong or extremely valuable.
That is something that follows me, too. There seems to be a person petty enough to give a downvote to about everything I post. Must be a really sad and lonely existence to have nothing better to do than that.