Hello. I've found that rather suddenly, all of my comments within the past week have exactly 3 downvotes. These are even on totally unassuming comments, like a comment I posted saying that French is used in a lot of African countries.

I believe it might be possible that I am suddenly being harassed be a user with multiple accounts or something.

Looking for some guidance.

Thanks all.

It's the exact same 3 users every time, so I believe your assesment is accurate.

Thank you. How did you see who is downvoting me? Curious what I can do with this information. If they are following me across multiple communities then I'm not sure who to report them to.

lemvotes.org

Thank you. I see them now. Do you know how I would go about reporting them and to who? Tbh I'm a bit confused on how this works with federated communities. It's not as if we're all on the same collective.

Will blocking them help stop them from mass downvoting me or no? Will they still be able to see and downvote?

I'm not sure there's much you could do except report them to the admins of their respective instances for vote manipulation.

Is voting “vote manipulation” though?

Do you happen to know how I can send a message to someone on the fediverse without navigating to their profile? I'm a bit slow but I can't seem to figure it out. When I go to the instance in question to figure out who the admin is, I can't message them because I am not logged in on that instance. Because my account is on lemmy.world. I tried searching their name in the post/comment search feature, but they don't seem to always pop up that way.

There is a "messages" tab where I can view messages that I have sent and received, but I can't figure out how to just send a new message to a user there without clicking on their profile first.

Thanks for your help. I guess I wasn't expecting that to be confusing unless I'm missing how to do it.

It is when you use multiple accounts to vote multiple times on the same content.

Looks like there are now four of them. This is very upsetting as I've blocked them and don't want to have to make a new account. :( I've never been systemically harassed before online.

Agreed - I guess I just interpreted it as having pissed off multiple people.

But if all three votes come at the same time (or same IP assuming mods/mod log have that info) that would be a pretty big clue.

You should be able to navigate to their profile from your own instance and hit the button to send a DM to them. AFAIK there's no place to just type in the user's account name and send them a DM without using that button unless using an app that has that functionality.

I guess that's my difficulty. I don't how to navigate to their profile from my instance. I only know how to go to their instance to find their profile.

https://lemmy.world/search?q=ReplaceThisTextWithName&type=Users&listingType=All&page=1&sort=New&titleOnly=false

Search for them with this and you should be able to go to their profiles from there.

If the instance you use hasn't altered the folders used by default you can just append "/u/<user@instance>/" to the url and it should go to them.

It occurred to a huge number of comments suddenly at 3:05-3:30am-ish. And then another user today just now. This is what it looks like for all of the comments.

The thing to do is stop giving a shit about downvotes. They will have zero impact your life unless you give them that power.

If you have to, it might be worth considering an instance that has downvotes disabled. It'd dodge the issue in the future.

On one hand, I completely and totally hear you. The thing that people don't think about is that they do color someone's initial impression of a comment. So you're significantly more likely to get more negative engagement from others that way. It's why some places/sites sometimes obscure the initial votes for a set number of time.

I want you to know you had 2 downvotes and I downvoted you only to make the total 3.

Yup, report to each instance and since you're on .world, to the .world team as well. I'd recommend matrix or a ticket for .world.

That kind of behavior is pretty well frowned upon no matter which instance.

You know when I initially joined Lemmy I was actually on Beehaw. Was a somewhat pleasant time until they went nuclear with defederating from everyone and all that jazz.

Doesn't other instance downvote still work though?

Time to create 4 accounts and a bot that upvotes all your own comments

welcome to lemmy.

nobody cares.

I say this as a victim of this as well.

I've thought about making an army of bots and going scorched earth on every single comment for everyone until the devs find a solution.

still might. 🤷 who knows.

The votes don’t matter as much as you may think. The sooner you realize that, the better experience you’ll have on this platform. Keep sharing your opinions and suggestions!

it would appear you've found your fan club.

now that you've identified your audience, it's time to start crafting content for 'em.

this could be an entire new hobby

mostly agree but when someone's coordinating multiple accounts, it's a form of astroturfed censorship at some point. especially for people who sort comments by hot / top.

you might be fine with him being silenced, but don't act like it's benign.

some one really likes you

Kind of, they just don't accumulate cross-instance, as far as I know

That's what you get for whining about downvotes ...

This. Just laugh at the idea that there's someone out there with such a sad existence that they spend time stalking people on this app.

Please be aware that we are currently monitoring the situation. I may or may not have some information for you in a couple of days or so. I apologize that it took a bit to reply to this, but we are looking at it now.

It's no problem. I appreciate the help! Not sure if they mostly got bored or not anyway!