Dog-piling is when someone expresses an opinion and people swarm in the comments telling the OC how wrong they are and how right they are. Typically the person getting dogpiled is downvoted into oblivion in the process. Note that I’m not talking about anything controversial in their opinion or the comment being trolling in any way; just any general disagreement with the groupthink.
Brief example:
User 1: There are lots of factors at play here, not just money. There's X, Y, Z, and those are all independent from money.
|____> User 2: No, it's money. It's always money
|______> User 4: Right? How can anyone think it's anything *but* money? Some people!
|____> User 3: Yes, well, X, Y, and Z wouldn't be a problem if not for capitalism, so it's definitely money, and you're wrong.
|____> User 5: It all boils down to money; always does.
|____> User 6: Of course it's money. Only a capitalist bootlicker would think otherwise.
|____> User 7: Go back to Reddit, troll.
|____> User 8: You're so close, but it's money.
...
|____> User 999: (Same as the last 998 comments; contributes nothing except attacking the opinion for being different)
None of that adds anything to the discussion; they’re not engaging on the subject, just attacking the opinion because it differs.
That behavior does not seem healthy to me and seems like it’s almost designed to discourage anyone from expressing any opinion that’s not part of the established group think. Again, I am not talking about trolls here, just any kind of differing opinions.
Should that kind of behavior be discouraged? If so, as a mod, what would be the best way to address it? After the 2nd or 3rd dogpile comment, start removing subsequent ones that are just piling on?
It’s definitely a people problem, so I’m curious what would be a gentle but firm way to deal with it.
When a topic gets too heated we have the ability to lock a post, it would also be useful to lock a comment for more granular control.
Yeah, locking a thread would be ideal. Am definitely known to lock a post when things get out of hand, but having the granularity to only lock down the too-spicy / non-productive thread would be way better and more fair to everyone else who’s not being an asshat.
Definitely
Does dogpiling happen on Lemmy? I’m a refugee.
Sometimes, but much less compared to Reddit.
Welcome here, here are a few pointers for you
If someone stands in front of a crowd and yells an opinion, I don’t think they should get angry when they get a bunch of replies instead of having the crowd elect a spokesperson who then gives a committee-decided solo reply.
Obviously the crowd wouldn’t elect anyone, they just have to accept what the first person to respond says!
I got this for saying I downvote copypasta. The whole thing was ridiculous, of course I doubled down.
None of that adds anything to the discussion; they’re not engaging on the subject, just attacking the opinion because it differs.
Responding when someone disagrees is literally how discussion works. The fact that there a large number of potential participants means there is a chance for a large number of responses, even if some are similar or even identical.
Responding when someone disagrees is literally how discussion works.
Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at (though apparently poorly lol).
Disagreements are quite often healthy. It’s the piling-on from the peanut gallery without adding any new information or perspective that I’m spotlighting here.
So, imagine 30 replies to your comment here amounting to absolutely nothing but “you’re wrong and I’m right!” and nothing else. Is that a discussion? I would say no, it’s not.
I don’t have to imagine!
So there are opposing camps that all want to avoid shitty behavior but work against each other, and some of the camps overlap. This is because some content gets negative responses when it doesn’t deserve it and soe does. This leads to some of the following responses and even moderation.
Don’t just downvote, respond with why!
Not everyone needs to reply, just downvote and move on!
Don’t downvote content you dislike, block and move on!
All of these are well intended in their own context, but also tend to be promoted as absolutes without nuance. The whole concept of group think is just a representation of what the majority of people happen to share opinions on. It isn’t coordinated or intentional, just a statistical representation of who clicks reply and/or the vote buttons.
Given that there’s no karma here, dogpiling doesn’t matter much. Can mute replies and move on.
Muting replies is not a thing on Lemmy.
There’s something called the “arisanal solution” ;)
You monster.
They are on Piefed. Quite a nice feature.
I’m eager to jump but Voyager is a must-have for me (I know it’s coming).
Voyager supports Piefed since yesterday: https://sopuli.xyz/post/29241539
Really? I’m sometimes caught offguard by how meager the Lemmy featureset is in places.
Edit: That said, even quite unpopular posts are unlikely to get so many replies that the user can’t deal with them, just due to the number of people on Lemmy right now.
Piefed has that feature. Quite useful.
I always tell myself I should hop into Piefed more often. And I never do it.
…at this rate I’m low-key wishing my instance shifts from Lemmy to Piefed.
Be the change you want to see. The more people use Piefed, the more instance admins will give it a try.
Or just ask your admin directly.
That said, even quite unpopular posts are unlikely to get so many replies that the user can’t deal with them, just due to the number of people on Lemmy right now.
You haven’t touched any taboo yet is my guess.
Maybe I just enjoy the haters.
As a commenter, I find the dogpiling notifications are the most intrusive part of such a situation. When a situation like this occurs to me I usually quickly disable notifications on the comment in question and move on with my life and it really makes it much more tolerable. I may go back to check on that comment manually from time to time to see if anyone has managed to come up to anything new worth replying to, but typically after a day or two that seems to become pretty unlikely. The comments themselves don’t bother me much, even if they are repetitive. I don’t mind that people feel the need to have their own personal voice heard on a particular topic but I don’t personally need to keep having it hammered into my brain every 10 minutes with a new notification either, I think it’s the notifications that turn it into badgering.
I think a lot of the toxicity might be addressed by allowing users to set a limit (with a reasonable default, even) of the number of times they’ll be notified about responses to an individual comment. Ideally you would also be able to enable/disable this on a per-comment basis, maybe you do want to be notified of every response to a particular comment because you’re basically polling people for their opinions, and of course you would want to keep the existing functionality to disable all notifications related to a particular comment because like I said I use that all the time. But maybe we could limit it to a default like “up to 10”, and then disable notifications, because after 10 replies, you probably aren’t getting much new information. It would make the storm of replies when something gets particularly controversial or viral or popular a lot more manageable.
Of course if you get into a reply back-and-forth with someone, and you’re arguing with a bunch of different people at once, that’s not dogpiling that’s on you.
Why would downvotes need to be discouraged?
It honestly doesn’t matter if someone downvotes you even if you’re 100% factually correct and they are absolutely wrong. This is the internet and up/downvotes are made up cool points.
People are going to troll, disagree, create alts to downvote, or do any number of other things that might make people sad or angry. Just ignore them. Investing thought into it will just cause your own grief and them to feel good about their actions. If someone is being pissy and you don’t like their comments just block them. We don’t really need anything more than that.
If someone just doesn’t want to see downvotes because it makes them sad, then they can join a server that doesn’t have downvotes. That solves their problem while still letting the people who don’t care about getting downvotes use their downvotes to show disagreement.
The downvotes are an example of behaviour typically associated with dogpiling. Focus on the unreasonably large amount of replies adding practically no information each.
You should probably be made aware the the person you’re replying to here is, in another thread, currently proudly admitting that they abuse the downvote function for reasons as petty as “this news article is about news I don’t like” or “I don’t like the OP”, and believes this is a justifiable use of downvotes.
So I’d say their take on voting is best disregarded.
In that case maybe just add a “mute replies for this comment” button if someone doesn’t like that lots of people dislike their comment and choose to voice their disagreement.
Why post to the internet if you don’t want replies? Sometimes you’ll get a bunch of upvotes and people agreeing with you. Some other times (for me i’ve found this one to be very, very few times) you’ll get a bunch of downvotes and people telling you how wrong you are and how right they are.
Just like life you have to take the bad with the good. No one has 100% perfect beliefs that everyone agrees with.
The “mute replies” button would be great, indeed. It would solve one of the issues with dogpiling. But other two remain:
- it discourages the participation of new users - because those are seeing the dogpile in full force, and they know they’ll be dogpiled once they say something the local hivemind disagrees with
- it adds unnecessary noise to discussions - because it’s a bunch of people saying the same shit over and over
Neither thing is welcome when you think about community growth.
Not being able to downvote or reply is discouraging engagement and creating an environment that only allows toxic positivity.
Not being able to downvote
As said in the very comment that you’re replying to, and as OP confirms, the downvotes are not the relevant part here.
You are not contributing to the discussion by insistently hammering on a marginal point, across multiple comments.
Not being able to downvote or reply is discouraging engagement
In some cases you do need to remove some forms of engagement, because they go against the goal of creating an active and vibrant community where users can discuss a certain topic. Engagement is the metric, not the goal.
And in the specific case of dogpiling, it’s rather clear that it’s the sort of engagement that goes against that goal.
The question here is how.
creating an environment that only allows toxic positivity.
“Toxic” is a weasel word that means nothing and everything at the same time; ask 1000 people what it is, and all 1000 will give you different answers. If you must use it, define what you mean by it, as I’m not going to assume.
Two comments is technically multiple, so at least my ‘hammering’ is efficient! Also, I think the two are intertwined which is why I commented in the first place.
I said toxic positivity, which is a thing that is defined: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_positivity
Three through the thread. That said two are too many, when the second replies to a comment telling the first comment already misses the point. The focus is on things like:
[Alice] I like apples. ├ [Bob] Why do you hate bananas, Alice? │ └ [Alice] I like bananas. I just like apples better. │ └ [Charlie] ur contradict u are self lol. U liek apples or bananas? │ └ [Alice] I like both. ├ [Dan] Put some bleach on your apples. │ └ [Ed] Yeah, Alice should not be here. ├ [Fran] Eeeeeeew apples are disgusting lmaaaoo ├ [Gio] Bananas all the way. I don't like apples. ├ [Hector] I assooome Alice never ate bananas. ... └ [Zed] BRAAAAAAINNNS! And bananas. No apple.I picked a non-political example to avoid intrusive discussions. (But it does affect political discussions too.) You see this shit in real life, and in Twitter (ye olde “Twitter MC of the day” boils down to dogpiling), and in Reddit, and here. And yet it’s non-contributive; it’s a bunch of people saying the same shit, if you’re Alice this shit is aggravating, and if a newbie sees it they say “nope, I’m not going there”. All because the “hive mind” decided bananas >> other fruits > shit > apples.
(Or that you must use the 3-2-1 rule for backups. Or that “animes”, “mangas” and “pokemons” violate everything that is sacred. Or that a certain game mechanic is shit/good instead of being good/shit. You get the idea.)
We need some way to address this. That’s what OP is asking about.
About downvotes vs. toxic positivity: that link works nicely to provide us a definition. I think “toxic positivity” = “social unacceptable of people acknowledging negative emotions and/or attitudes” should work well enough, is that OK for you?
I don’t notice it. Even in instances like Beehaw and Blåhaj (both deactivated downvotes), I don’t see this popping up. In Beehaw for example you can pretty much rant to your heart’s contents; as long as it’s reasonable, and you aren’t being an arsehole to other users, it’s well-received.
As such, if any measure addressing dogpiling needs to tweak how downvotes work, I don’t think it’ll breed toxic positivity. I don’t think messing with the downvotes would be necessary for this, though.
If you are the comment police please show your badge.
If you are the comment police please show your badge.
I wasted my time re-explaining the OP to you, because it’s clear that you lack the basic reading comprehension necessary to even know what people are talking about here. And because you don’t know it, but you were still willing to vomit your opinion and re-eat your own vomit, you were being nothing but a dead weight and a burden in this thread.
If this is “comment police” behaviour, I don’t know. Or care. I also don’t care if this hurts your precious fee-fees of entitlement so much you screech “waaaaaah, you is of comment polyce? wurr is you are badje???” My blocklist is full of dead weight like you, after I tell them to go fuck a cactus.
Go fuck a cactus.
Downvotes aren’t discouraged - just noting that as it’s part of the pattern. I should probably just remove that from the post since it’s not really relevant.
It’s possible, but not practical, to mod based on votes unless it’s blatant/explicit vote manipulation. e.g. “Wow, 10 people signed up for accounts just now just to downvote this person.”. I have seen that happen lol.
It’s the piling-on that I’m asking if/how to address.
I would say put a mute all replies button. That would make it so they aren’t bombarded by 1000 comments saying the same thing but still allow people to voice their opinions.
That’d be great if it existed, but AFAIK, nothing like that is available in the Lemmy API.
But I’m looking at this from a “fostering a healthy community” point of view. Someone comments that they prefer rainy days. Is it fair or constructive to the community to have 50 people to rip that person to shreds because those 50 people prefer sunny days?
I feel there’s a line somewhere; I’m just trying to identify it and figure out what to do when it’s crossed.
That’d be great if it existed, but AFAIK, nothing like that is available in the Lemmy API.
Shoot dessalines a message. It might be fairly easy to implement and it seems like something people might like. I know reddit had something similar for posts.
Other people are mentioning similar, so maybe it’s new in the API after 0.19.9 or something (or I missed when it was introduced). I’ll have to check.
Being an instance with downvotes disabled sorta helps for this imo
Can you explain how? Removing downvotes removes a signal, which I would think leads to an increase in the other two signals, upvoting and commenting. Since dog-piling is excessive commenting I feel like it would make the problem worse.
It I can’t downvote someone I’m more likely to comment my opinion, even if that opinion is dog-piling.
People that dogpile downvote too, it’s not exclusionary. Downvotes on Reddit were not meant to be a „disagree” button - it was intended for off-topic and rule breaking content. Of course platform has very little control over that and people started it to bury opinions they disagreed with below visibility thresholds.
Out of all the ways to solve this I really like what Tildes does. There’s no downvote button and only somewhat trusted users get to assign labels that work a bit similarly but force you to provide a reason for that downvote. For example, a pun that doesn’t bring anything to discussion can be labelled as „noise” which doesn’t remove or hide it but brings it to bottom. Other labels serve as quasi-report. It’s a solved problem but I think most people like dogpiling and downvoting.
FWIW Dog-piling also applies to upvotes. People see a headline or comment they agree with, even if it’s a complete fabrication, and upvote it.
Of course as you noted not everyone agrees what an upvote or downvote represents.
As for Tildes, it does help but also requires a lot more moderation. Not that I’d be against trying it, I do just wonder how well it scales up, especially if people disagree.
The voting on any website since the inception of the idea was intended to be a “like/dislike” counter to help guage the popularity of a post. Things that were well liked, get shown to more people. Things that are mostly disliked, don’t. That’s all it ever was, and it’s how a majority of people continue to use it.
„This is how it always was” is never a good argument but it’s not even applicable in this case. It was Digg that brought downvoting to mainstream and it was definitely a Web 2.0 thing. Old forums used upvotes only, sometimes labeled as „thanks” and such.
My argument was only against the statement “it was always intended to be this way.” Because, no… It wasn’t. I am not saying that it should be one way or the other.
Personally, I think this is where downvoting is a thing. Let’s be honest, us mods are demonized here for “over-modding”, I think this counts as one of those things where unless a comment breaks an established rule, then there’s no real rule breaking. Dog piling isn’t great and it doesn’t add anything, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that a mod needs to jump in and put a stop to it. Personally, I’d just wait until someone reports something to me that is rule breaking, otherwise any of those users can leave the thread if they don’t like it, or downvote. That’s my opinion though.
Maybe what another commenter said, “harsher enforcement of the rules when you notice someone being dogpiled”. Not a new rule directly, but that could be something (worded better than me) “Dogpiling is not banned, but will be watched diligently for rule-breaking”. No new rules or anything, but the second someone steps out of line you lock the thread or give them a temporary ban for breaking a rule. Similar to speeding in a construction zone.
Maybe adding a “no dogpiling” rule could be worth it.
I don’t see it happening too much in communities I mod, but those aren’t really controversial communities.
I think the thing it ‘adds’ is some kind of indication of social consensus. I agree it’s harmful to thoughtfulness and to people’s development of individual understanding rather than just parroting (see all of twitter). I do think the semi-anonymous forum style prevents a bit of the soap boxing compared to social media with your name on it, but it’s still clearly present here.
In terms of solutions I don’t have a lot of concrete ideas. I think this phenomenon stems from a broader social shift towards moral absolutism and outsourcing knowledge to experts (where who is trusted as an expert varies dramatically) rather than striving to understand things yourself.
Opinions that go against the grain require patience and suspension of disbelief with your conversation partner—something usually lacking in online discussion. A presumption of good faith (even where no good faith was intended) would go a long way.
Anecdotally in a formal learning setting when you take a student’s ideas seriously (even if they’re not very mature ideas) they learn to think through things better and consider them more deeply than when you just correct them with the most up to date spiel on the matter.
A few potential ways to address this:
- a rule against dogpiling
- a rule against replying without adding new information
- harsher enforcement of rules when you notice someone being dogpiled
I’d probably pick #3 but all of them are problematic: #1 and #2 can be misused by the mod because they have huge grey areas, #3 creates double standards. (“So you’re saying a «go drink bleach» is OK, but «this is dumb» is not???”)
Yeah…that’s why I’m throwing the question out there.
I would envision this falling under the “civility” rules in most places, but it would also be worthy of a dedicated rule. And yeah, reducing the potential for abuse is something to consider.
Basically, I see this happening a lot and am starting to feel like it’s creating a hostile environment that will never attract any new users (i.e. it’s bad for the Fediverse as a whole). I feel like this kind of behavior is just outside of the “respectful disagreement” that’s expected in most places, but I’m unsure what the best way to deal with it is (or if it even should be something to deal with).
I’ve noticed the start of the dog pile is typically not the issue. Often it starts by accident; like two users coincidentally replying the same thing to a third one, seconds apart, because they didn’t see each other’s reply. I feel like most people would immediately see it and say “nah, coincidence”.
The issue is how it keeps going on and on and on. So perhaps this could be addressed by avoiding the pile to grow, instead of just avoiding it from beginning? Basically, different rules for early and late replies.
I’m just throwing ideas in, mind you.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking. After the 3rd or 4th near-identical “you’re wrong, but I’m providing no new information on the subject” reply, maybe start removing them. The point is to avoid a dogpile/echo chamber forming, so nuking it from the first comment definitely wouldn’t be the way to go (or even really fair).
You can’t create rules against dog-piling when its being implicitly encouraged by strongly editorial moderation which cultivates a community which is reactionary to minority opinions.
Dogpiling affects even views that are orthogonal to what the mods would enforce. So it’s a more of a general problem.
I mean I can point you to it explicitly happening. I’ve been working on something broader that focuses on how editorial moderation shifted specific sub’s into echo chambers over the course of 2023-2024 to cultivate a community with a largely homogeneous perspective that was antiseptic to dissent. So I’ve been pulling and working on the data for this for quite a while.
I’ve got ample evidence to support my above statement. This isn’t speculation, and moderation has even explicitly said that they’ve moderated in a fashion to cultivate specific political narratives that agree with their biases.
I mean I can point you to it explicitly happening.
And I can also point you to situations where dogpiling happens regardless of any reasonable stake the mods would have on that discussion. If it happens with or without editorial moderation, then editorial moderation is not the cause.
I’ve been working on something broader that focuses on how editorial moderation shifted specific sub’s into echo chambers over the course of 2023-2024 to cultivate a community with a largely homogeneous perspective that was antiseptic to dissent. So I’ve been pulling and working on the data for this for quite a while.
I’ve got ample evidence to support my above statement. This isn’t speculation, and moderation has even explicitly said that they’ve moderated in a fashion to cultivate specific political narratives that agree with their biases.
If you have data to show already, do it now.
I think you are missing the point. The point is that dog piling as a behavior is something that is selected for or against by moderation over long periods of time. It’s a mind of culture or community that is cultivated. Rules in aside bar don’t have any bearing on the kind of community moderation is selecting for.
I don’t think I’m missing the point.
What I’m saying is that the rules would still help, even if you have a strongly editorial moderation cultivating a comm reactionary to minority opinions. Because the root cause of dogpiling is not in that moderation and their practices - like you said, the moderation is only selecting for/against it, but the root is in human nature.
And depending on how the rule against dogpiling is made, it could even curb down strong editorial tendencies.
So like I said, and thank you for making it clear, you are missing the point.
I’m explicitly saying that the root cause of dog piling is moderating selecting for a culture that confirms to their biases. The issue isn’t the dog piling, it’s that moderation specifically selects for it when it meets their biases, and only enforced policies selectively.
We have some real questions to address about exactly who owns a community or the content it creates. I, like many here, was there at the beginning of Reddit, coming from the first Digg migration, and before that Fark, and before that SA, and even CL abd IRC. There is a regular confusion that happens between site developers and owners that they themselves own or are responsible for the content a community creates, and that they should be in control of that. That same confusion exists with moderators and the communities that they are responsible for. Communities through the process of their creation create the rules and norms they abide by; not a side bar with some words on it. You can’t change behavior without a change in moderation, because this is ultimately the function the community responds to.
The issue is that communities (and more broadly, whole instances) are built to be tin-pot dictatorships, by design. The solution would be a more advanced set of tools that operate to get by in from communities in terms of policy and which also work to both reward and punish moderation.
What you are talking about is a normal internet conversation.
If you don’t want everyone showing up to call you dumb then don’t say stupid things lol
There’s a clear difference between people being mean to someone who didn’t know better vs someone who is full of shit
It’s not that easy. People often LOOK for malice and give people zero grace, it’s seen as an easy opportunity to white knight and get people to pile on.
It’s the worst part of online conversation, because it only takes one asshole to derail everything.
I’m here to get away from a normal internet conversation but with size it seems that it is inevitable.
I mean yeah, more users means more homogeneity
Yeah like somebody throwing around the term “terf” completely out of context to protect the reputations of men instead of being concerned about femicide and radicalization of men. Like what you did.
You dropping misandrist dogwhistles is what makes me think you’re a terf.
There’s a difference here. I got it for calling this quote “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Copypasta.
Which it is. It’s true, but It’s also tired and old, and people just post that with nothing else to add. Just that. It’s not even saying the quote is wrong or anything. Just that copypasta is annoying and lazy. Downvote and dog-piled for that opinion? Who would defend copypasta? Yet as of my last check, at least 92 people like just seeing that quote randomly posted over and over and over.
Yet as of my last check, at least 92 people like just seeing that quote randomly posted over and over and over.
92 people thought you pointing it out as copypasta was something worth downvoting. Maybe it was the way you said it, or that pointing it out as copypasta was a net negative for the thread if you didn’t add why it being copypasta was relevant.
I see where you’re coming from. I feel that joke comments that detail a whole thread I’d like to have discussion in is extremely frustrating. I sometimes wish they’d be banned, they’re not adding anything to the post, except… Maybe it’s helpful to people from becoming utterly hopeless and cynical.
I’ve thought about your point a decent amount of time for a few years and my thoughts are: people will people. It’s for moderation teams to set rules and lead by example and clean up messes, if users refuse to self mod. Sometimes dogpiling is that, other times just disagreement that agrees with someone else’s reasoning. Other times, it’s just validation seeking because people have no firm seld-identity and/or core beliefs. Maybe they’ll develop them if something really resonates, all exceptions acknowledged and considered. We don’t learn from being correct very often. We do by being incorrect, or finding exceptions that
flourflout our ideals.
