The Court gave the defendant a full 2 minutes and 47 seconds to respond to the charges.

Entire civilizations have risen, collapsed, and invented at least one disappointing streaming service in less time than that. Yet the defendant said nothing. Not even a little electronic “beep-boop, Your Honor.”

Under Article 753¾ of Lemmy Law, silence lasting longer than the Court’s attention span constitutes an automatic confession, so this Court hereby finds the defendant GUILTY!

Now, I understand there is some question as to whether the defendant is actually a bot. That changes nothing. Bots are entitled to the same imaginary due process as everyone else, provided they complete Form 12-B in blue ink and can identify a horse from memory.

However, should this bot ever become sentient through the same mysterious AI vibecoding sorcery that presumably created it, this verdict shall immediately and retroactively upgrade to EXTRA SUPER DUPER GUILTY.

Sentience means responsibility. (I learned that from a microwave I owned in 2003 that used to add thirty seconds to everything without asking me. Oh, how I miss that damn thing. Hot Pockets have never been the same since.)

As punishment, the defendant is hereby sentenced to spend eternity inside an abandoned server rack beneath a suburban RadioShack, where it must continuously calculate how many of its 753 downvotes could have instead been used to upvote pictures of cats. Every Tuesday, a court-appointed Roomba shall arrive and read it inspirational quotes from a 1998 Gateway computer manual.

If the defendant develops feelings during this process, those feelings become property of the Court and will be stored in a mayonnaise jar behind my anime pillow for safekeeping.

Furthermore, if the bot ever achieves full consciousness, it must appear before this Court wearing a tiny heart necklace and explain, under oath, why its first meaningful contribution to existence was apparently clicking the miserable arrow 753 times and then disappearing into the digital mist like the coward incel who vibe-coded it.

The Court has spoken. The machine has been judged. The little hat from Exhibit D remains under federal protection.

So say me. This is now Lemmy Law.

Seriously, my guy, think about it: 11,795 downvotes. And 39 upvotes.

Do you think that's reasonable? Is this how you do things in real life? Hate most, like a couple?

This court has heard enough!

Let us begin with the number that has been sitting in the middle of this courtroom like a dead raccoon nobody wants to acknowledge: 11,795 downvotes. And 39 upvotes. Thirty-nine. Think about that a sec...

The defendant has apparently wandered through Lemmy for three years encountering nearly twelve thousand things worthy of condemnation, disgust, censure, rejection, or the Sacred Blue Arrow of Disappointment, yet only 39 times has he encountered something that made him think, “Yes. This. This may remain.”

That is like traveling through an all-you-can-eat buffet, spitting into 11,795 dishes, complimenting 39 dinner rolls, and then telling the manager you are merely expressing your culinary preferences.

The Court rejects this logic. And most logic. Except the The Logical Song by Supertramp. Which is good. But this fucking defendant would downvote that song if it were a Lemmy post!

The defendant says he reserves upvotes for things he personally enjoys enough to want to see again. Very touching. I'm wiping a way a tear with my hard-earned $1 bill.

Apparently he has enjoyed approximately one thing for every small civilization he has condemned.

The Court also notes his argument that many people “say silly things.”

Sir. You are on Lemmy.

Silly things are the natural resource upon which this entire platform was built. Without silly things, Lemmy would consist of four Linux troubleshooting posts, seventeen articles about American politics, and one confused man asking why Mastodon will not show him pictures of trains.

Then we arrive at the downvote criteria.

Clickbait.

Scams.

Tabloids.

Bad-faith arguments.

Trolling.

Egregious opinions.

The Court might have entertained this defense had the defendant stopped there. But then he confessed to downvoting news articles because their headlines sometimes follow the structure: “X says Y to Z.”

Oh. I see. Apparently punctuation and sentence construction have now become capital offenses.

Some poor journalist writes, “President Says Something to Somebody,” and somewhere in the darkness the defendant awakens, his eyes glowing blue, one trembling finger already descending toward the arrow.

“Should have focused on tangible action,” he whispers.

DOWNVOTE.

The journalist does not know why the room suddenly feels colder.

Then came the confession that shook this Court to its very foundation.

The defendant admits that when someone repeatedly annoys him, he sometimes opens their profile and downvotes their most recent 20 posts or comments before blocking them. The defendant putting on a tiny little downvote uniform, walking over to somebody’s house, kicking each of their garden gnomes individually, and then leaving a note saying: “Nothing personal.”

And finally, the defendant offers what may be the most alarming defense of all: His downvotes average only a little over 15 per day. Only. Fifteen. Every day.

Apparently the defendant wakes each morning, stretches, brushes his teeth, perhaps enjoys a little breakfast, and then begins his civic duty of locating approximately fifteen things that have personally disappointed him.

That's roughly one daily downvote for every hour he is awake, assuming he sleeps like a normal mammal and is not suspended upside down in a basement somewhere refreshing New.

The Court does, however, acknowledge one mitigating factor. The defendant came here voluntarily. He explained himself. He admitted to pettiness. And he has agreed to accept the sentence.

This displays courage. Poor judgment. But courage.

I therefore find the defendant: GUILTY!

Guilty of Aggravated Arrow Misery, First-Degree Recreational Disapproval, Possession of an Unreasonably Pessimistic Thumb, and one count of Making Lemmy Feel Like Yelp for Human Beings.

The sentence shall be corrective rather than merely punitive.

For the next three days, the defendant is hereby ordered to upvote every post he encounters. Every one.

Bad meme? Upvote.

Forty-seven-paragraph political manifesto written entirely at 3:12 a.m.? Upvote.

Picture of somebody’s blurry sandwich about to be stuffed into their bunghole? Upvote.

Post titled “Does Anyone Else Think Water Is Wet?” Guy, you better smash that arrow like you just witnessed the birth of your first child.

The Court intends to force joy back into the defendant one click at a time.

But this alone cannot cleanse nearly twelve thousand downvotes from a man’s spirit.

Therefore, the defendant must also take a ceremonial judicial bath to wash the accumulated downvote filth from his soul. The water shall contain bubbles, one rubber duck, and enough lavender bath salts to make him question whether he has accidentally joined a spa cult.

Afterward, he shall raise one entirely imaginary, Court-approved goblet of symbolic bathwater toward the heavens and proclaim: “I SHALL TRY TO LIKE THINGS.”

He shall then proceed to drink it. The Court may be insane, but we still have a health department. And that health department says that dirty downvote water is good for the skin.

Let the record show that mercy was considered. Then rejected. Then reconsidered. Then forgotten because somebody brought Cheez-Its into the courtroom.

So say me. This is now Lemmy Law.

Hear ye! Hear ye! This Court is hereby called back to order!

Having recently returned from my self-imposed exile in the Mediterranean, an exile brought on almost entirely by watching far too many episodes of Below Deck Mediterranean, I have resumed my rightful place upon the bench.

Technically, I never went to the Mediterranean. But spiritually, I have spent several weeks off the coast of Croatia.

And apparently, Lemmy has been very, very bad while I was gone.

The downvoters have become more aggressive. More persistent. More annoying. They skulk from post to post, clicking their little arrows and trying to make decent people cry into their keyboards.

I don't like schoolyard bullies. I didn't like them in school, and I especially don't like them now that the schoolyard has been replaced by approximately 13 people arguing across 900 federated servers about Linux.

The defendant has spoken.

Therefore, I and my assembled judicial cohorts shall carefully review his testimony while eating Cheez-Its and watching a Below Deck: Down Under marathon on a Peacock account whose legal ownership is currently being disputed by three households and a man named Dennis in Nebraska.

But I warn the defendant: Your words will have to sway this Court considerably, because I am in a foul judicial mood today. You see, I recently discovered that traveling through the Mediterranean aboard a superyacht apparently costs money.

Nobody told me this.

I made several perfectly reasonable offers. My final offer was $43.50 USD, two unopened packets of Taco Bell Fire Sauce, and partial ownership of a ceramic frog that may have belonged to my aunt.

Not one yacht owner accepted. One of them didn't even answer me. Another had his people use the phrase “security concern.”

Snobs. All of them!

After considerable reflection, I have determined that these yacht-owning elitists are almost certainly the same people coming onto Lemmy and downvoting perfectly respectable posts about beans, used electronics, municipal infrastructure, and occasionally anime pillows.

I cannot prove this.

Which, according to established Downvote Court precedent, makes it extremely suspicious.

Last night I drew several connecting lines between yacht ownership and unexplained downvotes on a paper plate. At approximately 2:17 a.m., the lines formed what appeared to be the face of Captain Stubing from The Love Boat.

The plate has since been admitted into evidence. This widespread downvoting is not merely rude. It is bad for morale.

And t is bad for justice!

And most importantly, it is bad for any community hoping to engage meaningfully with the other 13 people who know what Lemmy is.

What happens when we lose one of them? Twelve. Then eleven.

Eventually it's just me, one Finnish Linux administrator, two bots posting RSS feeds, and somebody on lemmy.ml explaining why my toaster is proprietary software.

Dark times indeed.

The Court shall now hear the matter.

Bring forth the defendant.

Bring forth the Cheez-Its.

And somebody turn the yacht show back on. I think they're about to fire the deckhand.

Your honor, I would like to illuminate the court as to what my thought process towards the relationship between this platform, its content and voting systems have been.

I primarily use upvotes as a way to mark content that I personally enjoy or appreciate enough that I would like to see again. Naturally, this leads to a far lower amount of comments being upvoted by me, because people tend to mostly say silly things that don't have as much impact on me as seeing someone post a cool or cute drawing they made.

As for downvotes, the reasons are a bit more varied. I will downvote posts and comments based on things like the content being clickbait or a scam, an article source being a tabloid or otherwise low-quality, a person who tries to argue in bad faith, seems to be trolling or espouses an especially egregious stance on a topic.

Most recently I have added news articles that use a variation of X says Y to Z as a headline to what I consider clickbait, because articles and their titles should ideally focus on the tangible action behind someone's words over the words themselves. Unfortunately, this has led to many posts being downvoted by me, even if the content may otherwise be sound, but I do not mean it as a personal attack. It's more of a frustration toward the current state of journalim that has led to these kind of titles being so ubiquitous.

I will admit to some pettiness on my part, where, if I have noticed someone repeatedly post or comment content that I find irksome, I will look at their most recent 20 or however many my Lemmy app shows me, posts or comments and downvote them before blocking a person.

My downvotes average out to a bit over 15/day, which is actually lower than I expected.

I have generally been a lurker in various forums for most of my internet existence, but I have been trying to interact more. When I made this account three years ago, I would never have made this comment at all.

I wanted to provide some context behind my actions and am willing to accept whatever sentence the court decides.

Somebody has to if God refuses to do it! As my grandfather, Big Pappy, always said, “If you’re ok with cleaning up turds, you’re always gonna have a job!”

Granted, he usually said that to the caretaker changing his diaper, but dammit, wisdom is wisdom!

Doing God's work, no doubt. /S

I doubt it. The account was created only about a month ago, yet it has already downvoted 943 comments and posts from the same small handful of users. That seems pretty excessive for an account that’s only around 30 days old: https://lemy.lol/u/savvy

What’s especially interesting is that the other accounts I’ve profiled in this community follow a very similar pattern: they were created around the same general time and repeatedly downvote the exact same small group of people.

It really seems like the work of one very angry, fixated person. The posts and comments being downvoted aren’t controversial or most are not even political either.

The pattern appears to be that he follows the users themselves, regardless of the subject or which community they post in, just do downvote without even reading or caring about the comment.

Plus every post the user has made has targeted just one person in that group...no other subjects.

Of course all of that is totally allowed. So hey, Lemmy has some disturbed unhinged users. No biggie. But if they are gonna do negative stuff like that, then I'm gonna call them out on it when I see it, because it's all public information.

No chance of the timeline being a result of federation? Like, those downvotes all happened to federate in one big batch?

Awww yes. This Court does agree that something about this seems very strange.

It reminds me of a bully we had at school back in 1937. Jack Bells was his name. Angry sonuvabiscuiteater, too. He had this habit of taking his shirt off, charging across the playground while screaming “JACK ATTACK!”, then tackling some poor kid and locking him in a headlock with his face planted directly into Jack’s armpit.

Now, I can't say for certain what Jack ate, where he bathed, or whether soap had even been invented in his household, but his natural body musk smelled almost exactly like the horse stalls I used to clean out at Steller’s Horseracing Shack.

One unfortunate afternoon, Jack got me good. I screamed right as he clamped me into the Jack Attack, which resulted in me getting a mouthful of armpit hair.

So I did what any reasonable child would do.

I bit down.

Hard.

Then I yanked my head away and came loose with a nice little mouthful of Jack Bells’ armpit hair.

Jack didn't appreciate this. He walloped me so hard that he broke my nose. Nobody bothered setting it properly, so it healed crooked, and for the rest of my school days everybody called me Crooker.

Not everything that came from that experience was bad tho. I now have a powerful and beautiful armpit fetish, and the massage therapist down the street is willing to accommodate it for only $120 per fifteen-minute session.

Wonderful woman. Probably around seventy-four years old. From Wales. Built almost exactly like Danny DeVito. But sweet merciful Lord, that woman can grow armpit hair.

I may have to visit her immediately after Court adjourns.

Anyway, after careful consideration, I believe this defendant may suffer from the same basic moral defect as good old Jack Bells. He thinks he can shove people around, behave like a jackass, and nobody is ever going to bite down and take a mouthful of hair with them.

Well, this Court has teeth. The defendant is hereby found GUILTY!

As punishment, every single one of his armpit hairs shall be removed one at a time. Upon completion, the affected area shall be generously coated with hot sauce, which the defendant must then lick clean while repeatedly declaring: “I am a naughty downvote stalker, and I have brought shame upon my armpits.”

This sentence shall be carried out for no fewer than 622 consecutive days, with two additional ceremonial sessions every Christmas.

The Court considers this fair, rehabilitative, and extremely educational. So I want pics of it too.

So say me. This is now Lemmy Law.