There's also a trend of downvoting things 'just because'. Not sure if it's bots or just users who are trying to cater their feed by downvoting things they don't like. But if people just blind downvote with no engagement, I feel like it discourages people from posting. This place needs to be more hospitable than StackOverflow.

[–] alizard@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My personal rule on here and the other site has always been that I only downvote spam, misinformation, and actively malicious posts

[–] Polydot@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I also actively downvoted stuff that didn't belong on the subspace

[–] PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it's bots or trolls because what I've seen downvoted has been on topic, friendly conversations and had been just posted. There would be no reason to downvote a lot of the comments downvoted.

[–] sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 3 points 1 year ago

I think it's bots because of just how quickly a post gets nuked. Like, there's no way that many people even read the post and suddenly you've got 50 downvotes. There's just no way that many people read what I said, processed it, and decided it was so terrible it needed to be downvoted.

One of the reasons I'm happy to be back on lotide, I don't even see the votes for anything but posts.