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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I halfway was going to just drop it, but decided to come back and also explain it for any few that happened to trip across this time capsule of a comment years down the line, but see it on lemmy instead of kbin, and them getting confused about what I implied earlier

    on some social media sites where you upvote yourself by default, it’s all fine and dandy since that’s the default and everyone already has their own - people looking over messages know it all beforehand and everything is upfront

    on somewhere like kbin, where you have to go out of your way to do it, it can come off as manipulation to make a message appear to have a greater consensus than it would otherwise have. the next step up, and in definitely-ethically-dubious territory, is having multiple accounts to upvote yourself to boost your message

    early upvotes/downvotes makes others that are quickly passing by a message feel more comfortable piling on one way or the other; group psychology is funky like that. it’s also a way some bad actors social engineer the system to get what they want seen to be seen, while burying others. I’m not saying you’re doing any of that beyond upvoting only yourself, but maybe this all explains a little better on the reasoning about its sketchiness on upvoting yourself on specific social media that don’t give a self upvote by default. It’s not a god-awful thing to do since a single vote is mostly innocuous, but it also isn’t a good look when someone looks into it and spots it








  • I think you misunderstood what I said, I’m agreeing with you on the mental gymnastics, but the argument you put out wasn’t exactly the best when given to the PoV of the gymnast; they’re avoiding ingesting tap water in favor of bottled, but they ingest it regardless, unless they wash everything with bottled water like a very crazy person

    and didn’t expect to respond again about this crazy hypothetical person that lives rent free in both our minds, but I’m going to evict that person right now for my own sanity








  • for me, the main selling point of kbin over lemmy was the transparency in user interactions on here. the last straw on the camel’s back over at lemmy for me was seeing blatant vote manipulation hiding behind the end-user anonymity; kept an eye on some accounts that would instantly always get the same number of upvotes, dependent on the specific account, less than 3-5 seconds after posting. it was always some single-digit amount (I assume to not get flagged by the system), but that’s all it takes to signal others to feel safer upvoting it.

    the same can be done likewise to bury others’ content that they can view as competition to what they want seen, multiple early downvotes can act as a subconscious deterrent to others