The U.S. and U.K. led a series of airstrikes in Yemen on Thursday evening, setting off alarms globally about how the attacks play into the smoldering regional risk of conflict — including a stream of questions from Congress about whether Biden was legally authorized to conduct the strikes at all.
Not sure how blocks work in that regard actually, but yeah I have a handful of trolls following me around downvoting. It’s kind of funny cause it tends to happen always at a specific time every day where I just get like 5 downvotes on every comment. The fact that people devote their time to this is equal parts hilarious and sad.
The latest update of Lemmy added in a system that allows admins to deanonymize the votes on a comment in cases where there’s blatant vote abuse, so you can probably ask @dessalines@lemmy.ml where it’s coming from so that they/you can deal with it. I’m sure with time better systems will be put in place but for now this is the best tool you have to fight back against this sort of trolling behavior.
For example before I was banned from LemmyWorld they would constantly barrage my posts deep into the negatives whenever I posted anything left of center, and it would be nice to be able to break down the voting scores among each instance so that one ideology doesn’t just take over and become representative of the entire federation. From what I heard, Hexbear literally had to disable downvotes completely because LW reactionaries would slam every single post and every single comment they saw there, to the point it actually damaged their culture. The only way to defend against this is to either defederate entirely, or to ask the admin of the problem instance to ban you (so your posts stop showing up to their users) and if they’re a bad faith nazi instance (like sh.ithole) they can just say no.
I haven’t been worrying too much about it, since the vote count doesn’t ultimately mean anything.
I do hope we can avoid having reddit culture on Lemmy in the long run. I do think Hexbear approach is good, another approach I’ve liked was what lobste.rs does where you have to provide a reason for the downvote. That adds a bit of context and helps reduce trolling.
It is intersting to see how encountering different perspective can set some people off though.
I would really like to see that here too, sometimes i’ll get slammed and won’t know if it’s because I made a mistake or if I PO’d some racists. Hell, I wouldn’t even care about getting downs if they were transparent about why I was getting them. What I care about is keeping the signal:noise ratio high, and it’s hard to do that when you have some harassing assholes downing everything you post regardless of content.
Agreed, a lot of people just use downvoting as a form of harassment hoping to bully people they don’t like off the platform.