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People who post in other languages than English, do you also get mass downvotes ? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Recently, on the francophone lemmy, there was some discussion on downvote, as some posts (on francophone instance, or francophone communities) gets a lot of downvote without a reason.

Yesterday, I had post going up to -5 before going back to 1. It was a belgian newspaper article about new IA regulation in Europe in the francophone news community of LW. I am glad that so many people are interested in European affair and want to votes. But considering that it's not the kind of topic leading the heated discussion I doubt these downvotes were even about the topic but either some "random downvotes" or "people who haven't set their language filter properly"

Just curious if some of you experienced similar issues when posting in German/Spanish/Korean/Russian/whatever

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's because native English speakers are seeing it in their All feed. If it's appearing in the All feed and the user has their feed set to English language only, then the poster failed to set what language their post was in. So they are downvoting the post for not setting the language.

I personally don't agree with this, I'm annoyed when I see a post in All in a language I don't know, but I simply block the user and move on. But maybe the persistent downvotes would call attention to the issue and encourage the poster to use the language settings in the future. As is happening right here.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Yeah I just block communities in languages I don't speak. But maybe that doesn't occur to some users.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's a lot better now that I can block entire instances, but for a while half of my feed was stuff feddit.de and feddit.it no matter how many communities I blocked. I can understand how someone would just start mass downvoting posts that forget to set a language.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Did you try selecting only English and Undetermined in your account settings?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yep, that was one of the first things I tried to do to fix the issue, as I was getting frustrated with posts I couldn't understand and blocking multiple communities a session. At least now I can just block the whole instance and not worry about it, even if the process is cumbersome.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Sorry to hear. I might go to Feddit.it and ask them to configure their communities properly, you're not the first one raising an issue on their side

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I’d like the option to see news / posts from other regions that are made in English, because those do happen. But I too just block whole communities and instances out of convenience

[–] [email protected] 39 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's not just you, I get downvoted even in English.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Take my upvote!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I see unreasonable downvotes on posts everywhere on lemmy.

I suspect that either there are sociopaths who dislike everything, or there are bots being used to influence visibility of posts.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I've been working on something that can be used to manually identity mass downvoters and downvotees. It doesn't happen as much as I'd expected, but there are some humorous exceptions I've been able to pull with my limited research.

JLDC(@)lemmy(.)byrdcrouse(.)com, for example, has downvoted someone else at least 15,000 times.

One of their favorite targets is Viking_Hippie(@)lemmy(.)world, who had accrued over 1,000 downvotes from them alone.

Linkerbaan(@)lemmy(.)world has received over 10,000 downvotes, including over 1,000 from AlmightySnoo(@)lemmy(.)world.

BTW, I checked both you and OP out. No mass downvotes that I could see, although my data set is incomplete.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

What the heck

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

would you share this tool

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

For now, I'll take requests... But the tool is running on a potato.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

i literally have a list, but some of them are my alts. i feel like you've given enough hints that i could probably duplicate your work, though.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I don't see it in the German communities I'm in. Sometimes someone would ask for a translation of a meme or so, but that's pretty rare.

I wish the language settings were used more. My app of choice (Voyager) doesn't even let me select the language when I post. I think if a community had a default language and that were automatically selected when posting and commenting that would be great.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I wish the language settings were used more

That's the issue

Lots of non-English communities leave default/English checked. Either accidentally, or to be inclusive because they won't delete posts in English

The result is English speakers browsing "all" get a bunch of non-english posts.

I just block all the foreign language subs like that, but I'm sure some people just downvote when they see them.

But the overall problem, is theyre not setting their language settings correctly

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

But the overall problem, is theyre not setting their language settings correctly

Definitely. Both users and mods. If they would, there wouldn't be any issue.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

By the way, beside ich_iel, which relax, laid back german community shall I follow to not forget the few German I know. All I do at the moment is listening once a month to DW Langsam gesprochene nachricten which isn't enough to stay fluent.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (2 children)

If you hope to keep your german up to date, I strongly advise you to stay away from ich_iel. The sub is essentially all about literal and deliberately wrong translation memes.

Try [email protected], it’s a general news and conversational community, without the forced translation nonsense

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Ja, bleib da bloß weg. Die ham' alle 'nen Hau.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Subscribed, danke

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (2 children)

People haven’t set the language filter properly

Did you correctly set the language of the post in the first place?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

weirdly I can't set the correct language for a comment if that's not English. for example if i add a comment in another language, even after setting the main language to that language I can't change it in the comments setting. it kinda reverts to unidentified. hate this bug.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

The languages you can use are limited by the community configuration

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

In general I try to so. that said even if I fail to do so, why would you follow a community in a language you don't know.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

You don't follow it, you see it from All

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If it's in a language-specific community or instance then it makes no sense to downvote imo. I personally do downvote unlabeled posts in communities that aren't language specific though, because they clutter my experience.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

A lot of us just browse all, given how little content there is overall

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I feel like Lemmy's interfaces should be doing a better job at this. As in: we [users in general] almost never tag the content of our messages by language; and this should be addressed.

That's likely what's causing those downvotes - some people see content in a language that they don't speak, and downvote it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

As in: we [users in general] almost never tag the content of our messages by language

May I ask how one would go about doing that? I know it's a feature of the protocol, but it seems to be inaccessible to me on my client of choice (Jerboa). The vanilla web UI seems to have even less feature accessibility

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

But why would people downvote content in other languages?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't know. But if I had to guess it:

Some downvote anything that they get no value from. Some see Lemmy as some sort of Anglo e-Lebensraum, and get pissed that people "dare" to use other languages here. And some are a middle ground, like "I feel entitled to be able to read everything posted here, but I'm a monolingual, so you need to post in English for MY sake! Reeeeee!" style.

Just... again, I'm guessing it. I might be wrong.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Expecting to see content in a language you understand is totally reasonable. Down voting may not be the correct way to handle that, but insulting people who just want to view content they can read is totally uncalled for

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I've set up three cases there. I'm mocking the third and denouncing the second, you're talking about the first.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Because a lot of people are British and American

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

여기 한쿡 사람이 없는데요

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

한쿡?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

要試試看嗎？

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yesterday, I had post going up to -5

5 is a non-issue. Just a little noise. When you get 500, then we can talk.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

-5 on a 400 subscribed community where it's rare to see posts above +5 is significant, the francophone lemmy is still quite small. Not clear whether it's why the downvotes are visible compared to bigger language, or whether there is people downvoting stuff on all which aren't in english

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

For Spanish, I don't think that is much of an issue as there is only sporadic activity on [email protected] and [email protected].

I know that there is https://feddit.cl/, but those are mostly Chile-specific communities so I don't follow them that much.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Yeah, like the others here I don't see it for German (just see [email protected], posts there go hard & into all feed pretty regularly) but I only really see German and English posts... I can't remember my filter settings, but I think I set them to allow all languages so that could be due to other languages being downvoted, the instance that I'm on or the biggest general use/non-specialised instances being English and German

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I didn’t really encounter something like that. Sometimes I comment a one liner in German and they all get upvotes. (I wonder how many people in the Fediverse are German)

Guess: When it comes to full posts, I think it is kinda expected to put a translation into it. I can see people getting unreasonably annoyed by the fact that they don’t have an information instantly available to them. So they might just downvote out of frustration? Which is kinda dumb, but the train of thought makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I posted a cover of a classic Korean rock song to c/Coververse and got down voted for that. Songs I'd posted in English didn't get that response. Idk if it was due to the fact the song was in Korean, or due to voters not recognizing the original.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If anyone from feddit.it sees this, please set your language defaults to (presumably) Italian!

I just put them in my block list but I'd rather that be for much more extreme problems.

And to OP it's most likely because of this issue. Blocking isn't the right solution. Downvoting at least conveys that SOMETHING is wrong on their end. So people probably use it as such.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Note that, with some other french speaker we've done a couple of experiences with language tags. Some instances ignore the c/ default language https://sh.itjust.works/post/16306134 so even if the community is properly set some languages aren't set automatically.

Moreover some /c/ may want to be multi-lingual and then users need to set language by hand no matter what

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It feels like an issue that should be solved with additional features. Understandably it's a low priority issue, but the current setup is going to produce this type of issue, and it's not really something that we can blame on anyone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

The trick is that the fedi, has already better tools than reddit/Xitter. We can already flag the language and filter by language, which is feature reddit still doesn't have. So it's also about people using it rather than blocking/downvoting

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

For posting and discussing regular news in the German communities, no. But once you deviate from the mainstream political mindset dominant on Lemmy, it's not much different from communities in English.