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Anyone else had problems with downvoting bots? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.