You could act like my cat after buying her the coolest, most expensive toy: just ignore it.
Ok kinda off topic but you don’t need expensive toys. Just watch what your cat enjoys doing the most. For mine, it’s jumping (herself or the toy) and feathers.
pretty sure their cat mostly enjoys ignoring all the sacrificial gifts they bring them.
It’s just a different way of enjoying the toy, that’s all.
I give me car plastic straps that holds bundles of news papers together. I deliver news papers so it’s a endless supply . Also a little beaver you can stuff with catnip I got for like $5 .
One of mine loves used zip ties. Especially in the bath tub, where they can’t escape.
Haha that’s just like my Lilly. She drowns zip ties in her drinking water though.
I give me cat plastic straps that holds bundles of news papers together. I deliver news papers so it’s a endless supply.
- Eugene Krabs
Tried many toys, my voiding prefers the crunchy dried up leaves that sneak in and leftover paper towel rolls
I wondered about that - I sort of assumed it was either a cat hater who’d accidentally subscribed “why do these things keep popping up in my feed?”, or someone with impossibly high standards for what a cat is “No, that’s just not quite cat enough. That’s a down vote from me”.
A bot is probably a more likely explanation.
Yes, you are right. If a mod wants I can send them the username and they can ban them from the community. I can see it as an admin from my instance but I can’t take action.
Gotta be several accounts though, right?
There is one account that has a single comment from 5 months ago that is downvoting most posts and comments. That one is very suspicious
Other than that… No other accounts are as obvious. A few do have some reoccurrences but most of those votes do seem organic on first inspection.
We’ll look really silly when it turns out they just have the highest standard in the world for what constitutes adding to a discussion.
Thanks for the feedback. I was just thinking that because most posts get several downvotes (at least 3) once they reach a certain popularity.
A botnet could have many unique accounts, and some could even appear like users. So I can’t rule it out. I also haven’t done a deeper dive into the accounts.
But when a post gets popular I would expect it to get at least a few downvotes, regardless of what it is.
Prolly a dog person. Let’s start posting cats>dogs over there….
(I jest. It’s not like fake internet points even really matter,)
Yeah, I really don’t get why somebody really cares enough about the traffic maybe to even set up a bot
here really doesn’t make sense. Unless it was like a dog photo or something. but also, it could just be a testing ground for a bot that’s going to get used for a… self-evident motive.
Pretty sure the mods (and definitely admin) can see whose downvoting what.
That testing ground really does make sense.
Edit: Also, funnily enough my testing of the keyword bot seems to have stopped downvotes of comments in the thread (but not the post itself)
I think there’s a way to look up the logs of who downvoted and then you can just block them. It won’t block them for everyone else, though.
I don’t think regular users have access to that info on lemmy. (Maybe you’re thinking of a kbin feature?)
You’re right. Upon further investigation, I realize it’s only something that instance admins have access to.
The bots are trying real hard to bury this post. Guess I triggered the keyword. How does one look that log up? And does blocking a user really disable them from downvoting your post?
Upon further research, I’ve realized that the upvote/downvote logs are only available to instance admins. Also, other users have said blocking a user does not disable them from downvoting your posts, so my idea wouldn’t work anyway. Sorry :(
Or maybe this isn’t the kind of content (even well tagged meta) that lots of readers want to see or think is good in general.
Of course, traditionally any whining about downvotes or other vote manipulation should be met with downvotes.
The way to fix this is to chill out. It might not even be a bot.
