Before Lemmy I never really did social media. Lemmy is my first experience in getting ratioed. I notice a surprising amount of my posts get 50% or more downvotes. I never realized how divisive my opinions and communication style is.
Thankfully I’m in a good mental place in my life, so this doesn’t bother me… too much. But I can see how it would have a big impact on people testing their toes, and expressing their voice for the first time, that dopamine hit of validation is tempered by the lows of feeling unpopular social pressure.
I’ve notice other people getting downvotes, and they just delete their comment entirely. I leave mine up, since I believe in keeping the forum record open and transparent is more important then my posting history.
I keep posting to Lemmy in spite of it, because I know Lemmy is just at its starting point, and content is more important then my personal validation. (but it does eat at me some)
When you post something that gets negative feedback do you modify your post? does it change your opinion? does it impact your participation in the community?
I tend to get downvoted quite a while recently, you can look at my history.
I would say to try to keep it in perspective. Some random person on the internet pressed a button because they disagree with you. No big deal.
With comments it’s a different story, sometimes they make me change my mind.
Yeah, I think people don’t think about how downvotes aren’t meant to indicate disagreement but rather to mark trolls, unhelpful comments, and so on. I didn’t realize that either until someone said it in some comment section somewhere, something like this:
I think your mental place definitely could use a lot of improvement since this is a topic that’s clearly bothering you. Still, this is very normal and you’re not alone on that sadly. Just remember, upvotes/downvotes are not a decider of truth. You can be absolutely right and be downvoted to oblivion. It just determines how much you match the group think of that community. The approval of faceless nerds is irrelevant, espsecially on reddit-style forums like Lemmy where your votes are literally meaningless. It’s more of an actual issue on something like twitter/tik tok/youtube/etc where your interactions are part of your personal brand.
