Hi. I recently had some issues with my lemmy client which made me accidentally post the exact same thing here twice. The posts were about privacy on my school issued computer. I could have made it more clear, but I wanted privacy from the companies that make their spyware not from the school that owns the computer. Anyway, as of now one post has more than 40 upvotes and less than 5 down. The other has 10 up and 5 down as well as significantly less helpful and more critical comments. My hypothesis is whether the early comments were helpful or critical determined what other people said. I am curios to see what everyone thinks of this.

I am not sure about that. Just like I did on Reddit, when I see double post I’ll downvote the second post and comment that it was posted twice. If I have something for the discussion, I’ll put it under the first one.

permalink
report
reply
14 points

I definitely believe there is some truth to this. How much? I don’t know. But definitely some. Same with scores biasing people’s initial opinions. Hopefully this positive first reply helps set the tone. We’ll see I guess!

permalink
report
reply
3 points

It used to be the same on the old site, where there was a wider distribution of opinions. It’s interesting to see it here, too, where most opinions seemee bias to one side.

permalink
report
parent
reply
10 points

I can’t explain the differences in comment tone, but the differences in votes are understandable. People don’t like to see duplicate posts in their feed.

Personally, if I want to upvote a particular that has a duplicate I’ll always upvote the one with more upvotes. And I’ll usually downvote the other, too. I don’t want to have to open both posts to read the comments, so I’d like the community to align behind one of the two posts as the “real” one.

permalink
report
reply
7 points

I have had similar thoughts about early posts and upvotes and downvotes making people more unlikely to post even slightly differing opinions for fear of getting a negative number or something silly like that, but this seems like an issue with the platform in general and is only worse because we have a smaller community on Lemmy.

permalink
report
reply
6 points

I was thinking it was subconscious but now I am wondering how many of them are just trying to get upvotes / likes / whatever lemmy calls them. Still my 2 posts make an interesting example of it but I want to figure out what causes this. I also think it is possible that people with differing opinions may just want to leave something alone to be non confrontational leading to a mini echo chamber.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

Remember that many of the people here are ex-redditors and their first instinct is to be a shitty reply guy instead of Assuming Good Faith.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

That is true. I am an ex redditor but only used Reddit because lemmy didn’t have enough users yet.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

There is a huge herd mentality on here. You have to avoid certain topics, and I can’t tell you what they are without getting downvoted. :)

People love their bubbles.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Drop the topics! Downvotes don’t really matter on Lemmy, it’s not a karma whoring platform.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

I know school/work is. Anytime people talk about wanting privacy at school or work people start ranting about how you don’t have an expectation of privacy at school or work. If we lived in a world where you didn’t have an expectation of privacy on the toilet that wouldn’t make you wrong for wanting it.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

I believe most people would have seen that it has been post twice and reacted only with the first one they saw or the one with most reactions. Beside I guess the post with most comments could have been more promoted when using active / hot sort on home.

permalink
report
reply

Privacy

!privacy@lemmy.ml

Create post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

Community stats

  • 7.4K

    Monthly active users

  • 2.8K

    Posts

  • 75K

    Comments