Estonian Request Post Hit with Downvotes!
I'm not sure how long ago this has happened, but when I checked the Estonian request post today, which had hundreds of upvotes previously, it had a whopping total of 15!
First Finnish, then Latin, then English from Georgian, what is happening with the upvotes on language request posts? If this is a bug, it's an annoying one.
Does anyone have any answers or theories on this?
18 Comments
As I'm looking at Lrtward's language request post, I see that this has happened to a lot of request posts, Afrikaans and Catalan included.
1471
Icelandic too. Every link I click on seems to have more lingots than up-votes. It does not seem only to be targeted at the most popular requests: Greenlandic certainly had many more votes the last time I looked; Mapudungan has 33 comments, 11 lingots and one up-vote; Occitan 108 comments, 55 lingots and three up-votes...
Once again I can't help but think how convenient that is for Duolingo if all those languages they don't plan to implement move down from the board list. While those they actually implement stay on the very top, which makes it look like they'd actually listen to the board users.
It's also a possibility (but it's quite a stretch) that Duolingo used sockpuppets (or something else) to remove all upvotes from the request threads of the languages we really want.
Duolingo wouldn't need any sockpuppets to change a number. Isn't it an interesting coincidence, how the "downvoting" ended slightly before zero? If it had dropped into negative, the thread would have disappeared and people would have noticed immediately. Some internet troll wouldn't care. Duolingo would.
I've checked the languages that have been added to the incubator with links that still work, under the hypothesis that, if this were true, Duolingo would also mess with those because they've been entered into the incubator and thus no longer need attention.
-Bengali and Catalan were both affected.
-Chinese was NOT. (If your conspiracy holds true, it's because people would definitely freak out if Chinese lost votes.)
-I have also checked Thai, Tamil, Telugu, Tagalog, and Punjabi. A couple of those are still over 100, a couple aren't. I'm not sure which ones were affected.
I'm still not quite convinced, as Latin was unaffected, and I don't think Duolingo has much interest in Latin, but you might be right. Let's see if this thread gets deleted. :P
I think you misunderstood my point: Chinese would NOT be affected because they're already implementing it. They would definitely want to show that what they're implementing is exactly what users demand. No user would care about downvotes here anyway because it's already in beta.
If I'm not completely mistaken, Latin was already affected several weeks ago, when it went down from the top with more than 2000 votes. You can read about it here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/25384007/What-happened-to-the-Latin-request-post
So far it seems ALL the top languages that are not implemented yet are being "downvoted", while those Duolingo is already working on now went to the top instead. Could be a coincidence. A funny coincidence though.
That is strange. There must be strong enmity towards these highly requested languages. Or, since people do give out those links a lot, perhaps some users downvote those request posts on purpose? I'm not sure why that is happening, but I'm glad you are making the community aware. ^ ^
Then it wouldn't go down over night but continuously. Hundreds of downvotes in one night with not a single one since then?
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I find it somewhat difficult to believe that there is human agency behind these downvotes; another one of the litany of bugs in the new code seems a much more likely explanation. If it is deliberate and malicious, however, it will have almost certainly been done with a script, which Duolingo ought to be able to detect: has anyone reported these happenings as bugs/abuse?
Are these the official voting threads or additional threads created afterwards? If they were additional threads, then they may be downvoted for being clutter, but if they are the official voting thread then it makes me sad to see so many downvotes. :(
They are the official voting threads, aka the original language request posts.
I'm not sure how much attention Duolingo pay to those posts anyway, so don't panic too much, but it seems like there's some malicious downvoting going on across the board.
