As a reader, I say “not for me” and leave overly negative things there for others to enjoy. The way I feel better is not reexposing myself to a reflection of all the ills in this world that I’m constantly being shown can be awful. But some people find catharsis in it! One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, after all. I am sure some people would dismiss some things I like as too saccharine and not realistic aka gritty enough.

I don’t think they are trying to decrease/cool down their anger. I think they are trying to engage in it.

I’ll be honest, as long as people are not acting awful towards their fellow human beings (like taking out anger on a person who has nothing to do with it, punching someone over cutting in line at the bank) I do not particularly mind if people are increasing their anger and aggression instead of decreasing it. Jogging it out and getting angrier is still far better than punching it out at a person, especially since you probably still reap the health benefit of jogging.

Thanks for the link though, fun read! I guess we should go to bed angry ;) Clicking one of the links in the article you linked was pretty interesting…

One man in the rumination group became so angry while hitting the punching bag that he also punched a hole in the laboratory wall.

My concerned side worries for that guy and the budgets of the people doing the research but most of me says “that’s just funny”.

Genuinely? I think there are always a couple trolls downvoting anything and everything, or people who can’t resist being contrarian for the sake of it. I see downvotes applied to on-topic, factually correct, and completely uncontroversial posts and comments all the time. For example, go to any cute animal community. You’ll find various inoffensive pictures of the animals, with zero incorrect assertions because it is literally just a picture, and at least a few of these pictures of critters the entire community is about (so it’s on-topic) will have a few downvotes anyways. Same principle could apply here. If there are lots of upvotes I almost expect to see a few downvotes as “noise” from trolls.

Also because Lemmy has Local and All, maybe there are people who, not caring that the community is Games, see this in their Local/All feed and do not like video games or Wolfenstein so they just hit downvote for “dislike” and move on.

Sometimes I fat-finger my phone and downvote something I didn’t mean to. I always take it back, but I imagine not everyone would undo their accidental downvote. Especially if the sequence is downvote -> crash -> reopen tabs -> wait where was I, whatever I don’t care enough to undo one downvote online

If the feature actually worked as intended I could see myself ignoring the rest of the game and just chatting with the townsfolk.

In reality, I imagine the NPC would totally forget what we were talking about after a certain amount of messages pass. Limited context windows and all that jazz.