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
You are still affected by this. Upvoted posts and comments tend to show up earlier in your feed (except if you're sorting strictly by new). Some instances may even decide to auto-hide content below a certain threshold. So a politically motivated group or even just a person with a significant enough bot-army could manipulate post visibility and kinda soft-shadow-ban people they deem unfavorable.
OK, I'll give you that. I don't really use the whole feed thing often, and that didn't occur to me. It doesn't seem to be a problem so far, though.
If that changes, I'll write a Lemmy reader that strips out the democratic elements and just sorts by newest for me (if someone else doesn't do it first). Probably less work than managing an army of Lemmy bots. I wrote and manage just one -- a fortune teller that lives on my instance and does I-Ching readings.
Do other people use the feed a lot? I haven't really used social media prior to Lemmy. A lot of what people consider important comes off as a bit alien to me.
One of the answers to have a 'controversial' or 'bottom' sort order for posts and comments