superessedi wrote: ↑Mon Feb 21, 2022 12:18 pm ... there is not even a single thread with more upvotes than downvotes. Not even one positive thread! That is, not counting the "-5"'s, which are made invisible. ... on Duome we don't have anonymous downvoting, ...
There was a rumor from years ago, after the TV show 'Millionaire' went to Russia. They had problems.
It was a quiz show, in which the contestant had three "lifelines" to use in case the answer to a question was not known by the contestant. The contestant could pass on one question (1), or phone a friend (2), or the contestant could poll the audience and when the contestant would choose, "ask the audience," the audience would electronically choose answers from a keypad at their seats, so that the number of answers would display on a screen, so the most popular answer could be seen by the contestant (3).
When a contestant would "ask the audience," normally, the contestant could use the most popular answer and succeed in providing the correct response (even though the audience wasn't always correct, mostly the polled answer was correct). In Russia, this didn't work the same way. In Russia the audience consistently would vote on every wrong answer. So, contestants were forced to choose the answer with the lowest score, when asking the audience. Russians were deliberately trying to make the contestant lose. There's a joke there somewhere. You can fill in the blanks.
What does this have to do with the old Duolingo forum? I'm going to draw my own conclusions, and I hope you'll do the same. I suspect that it has less to do with legitimate users, such as you or I, though, and more to do with an alternative explanation.