-37
Downvoting on Social Media is Toxic
(aussie.zone)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
-37 points (18.6% liked)
Unpopular Opinion
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Do you think people can't think for themselves and just vote the way other people are voting? I'm inclined to be insulted, but then again I live in a first-past-the-post "democracy" so you might be onto something there.
If there's truly nothing wrong with your message, then downvotes are a badge of honour. When you catch downvotes for saying "everyone deserves food" or "don't be so hard on the gays" then other people are telling on themselves when they downvote.
However, I definitely believe people are out there saying indefensible things and then blaming their audience for disagreeing with them. "I'm not racist, but..." can lead to a "Well you people are just too sensitive"
I believe on some front ends, a comment that collects a certain amount of downvotes is automatically collapsed. So it actually spreads less negativity, although you could probably see how brigading by trolls could abuse this.
I don't really have a dog in this fight though, I can't downvote from my instance.
You can see even in this thread that completely innocuous statements like explaining the reason I do something in response to a question are getting downvoted. The same 2–4 people keep coming back here to downvote everything I post. I've also had people going through my post history and just downvoting everything indiscriminately, across multiple communities.
That's before we even get to the group think. Once a "side" is "winning", there's a real cognitive bias to continue that trend. That's just human psychology. Most people look at the vote first, and that biases how they read the comment. If it's -4, obviously there's something wrong with it, otherwise why would it be negative? That makes you see negative things that weren't there before. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.
It doesn't really have anything to do with improving the community's content. Maybe a few people use it that way, but I think most people just use it as a dopamine button to "kick people while they're down", so to speak. You can check my post history yourself to see if I'm a racist or not.