I can fully understand when me or someone else gets downvotes for saying something controversial or silly (yeah, it happens, I admit), but why would anyone come here and spend time downvoting things that perfectly align with the political climate here?
Are we that popular that we are being displayed in other instances so often? Do we have lurkers who only pretend to be communists? And in that case - Jesus, I thought that I am wasting my time sometimes… 😆
The fact that the first thing I received was a downvote is a comedy gold.
There’s a couple reasons, I think:
Sometimes comrades downvote posts that look like they might be troll questions.
Our posts do get some traction out in “all”, and “regular” libs see our viewpoints and downvote out of anger/cognitive dissonance.
There are at least a few motivated downvotes lurkers. It’s lame, but it’s been happening for a while.
I think one particular troll/griefer has a group of accounts they bring along. You’ll notice specific comment threads with something like 17 downvotes on every comrade saying things that are normal here.
There’s a Lemmy bug that pushes 3yo posts from here all the way to the top of the “all” queue, and they get absolutely obliterated by downvotes from regular Lemmy users.
No no comrade, they don’t obliterate them. We obliterate them; we’re so powerful even our 3 year old posts are still making them seethe and getting traction.
The glorious immortal science of Marxism-leninism!
This and the Barbara Streisand effect as other instances are making threads and creating drama about us, which will lead people to look us up out of curiosity (I won’t link anything because I don’t think it’s healthy for us to participate in it). For any such lurkers, I encourage you to take a good look around and read what we actually write.
Literally how I found GenZedong. I used to browse latestagecapitalism and antiwork on reddit and kept seeing people shitting on “those authoritarian tankies over at GenZedong” which made me look it up out of curiosity. I think this is a net positive. Many people already have the right mindset but just need a lead to follow. And some may find their lead here.
Personally I’m not bothered by people/bots/feds coming here to downvote us. On reddit downvotes are terrible because not only does “the algorithm” take the voting scores into account and tends to “hide” posts with a low score, but if your user’s score is too low you’re unable to post and comment in some subs. But on lemmy none of these things are true. Lemmy doesn’t even keep track of a user’s total voting score.
That’s a good point! There does seem to be some drama-stirring that feeds people coming here maliciously.