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.
It was definitely this comment that spawned the activity. https://sh.itjust.works/comment/1661162
I initially made the comment, got a couple quick initial downvotes due to my mistake thinking it was a quote from Reddit CEO Spez. I added an edit to clarify that I was mistaken, and then came back a few hours later to find that all of my posts and previous submissions were, like you said, about 5-20 points lower than they were before.
Kind of disappointing honestly. Not that I’m a karma whore, but because I’ve been making lots of posts in the [email protected] community to try to get it off the ground, and I assume that having a community full of downvoted posts isn’t going to help.
This sounds to me like sockpuppeted profile stalking and downvoting. I’m going to try reporting your comment with a note that while the comment itself is ok, the material it describes warrants an admin investigation into sockpuppeted voting. Instance admins mod this community, and hopefully they have time to take a look. Given that there are several credible reports of this kind of thing now, it seems worth an admin checking out.
Cool thanks, we’ll see how it works out. Just hoping a busy admin doesn’t see the initial part that is a quote that I was reacting to and immediately bans me out of reflex.
I think you’ll be ok. The comment I reported is the one I replied to, not the one in the Swartz thread. There’s nothing naughty in your comments in this thread, so admin will have to read and click before even encountering your Swartz comment and will at that point be primed to investigate sockpuppeting rather than content policing. They’re also pretty chill here, I haven’t stumbled on anything in your history that would lead me to be concerned about them finding you to be at fault for this situation or otherwise an abusive user.
Sounds good. Appreciate it!