Maybe I’m oversensitive? We all know our votes here are public record, but to me it seems like weird, obsessive, and unhealthy behavior.
It definitely is a red flag for me to the point where I wonder if I shouldn’t just outright block people who go around making it known it’s something the participate in.
depends on what the motivation/conclusion is, if someone suspects an account of being a bot or such and calls out “hey this account is mass-downvoting anything to do with botswana” then it’s perfectly reasonable.
But if they try to make some personal judgement over it then it feels a bit:
Creepy? Probably. Pathetic? Absolutely.
I think if you obsess over ‘figuring out’ the person, it can be weird.
I have definitely checked post history and upvotes on some users just to get context for their comments. It has saved me wasting time trying to have a discussion with someone who only seems to ever look for fights.
For some people, that’s all they have. Vote like everyone can see and give no shits about lurkers being vexed.
Same goes for commenting. Sometimes it can be funny when someone goes through your post history just to quote a comment you make 2+ years ago and still be wrong.
Usually, yes, it’s weird. One day a while back, a lot of my recent comments were all getting one downvote, and I was curious. Apparently one person was mad at something I said and went through my comment history to downvote things. There are times where it’s somewhat useful to view, but obsessing over it is strange.
Where can I even see post votes?
No, it’s fucking weird for folks to do that. You’re not sensitive, they are just insane and no well-adjusted person does that.
Yes, it’s pretty pathetic actually.
Have you seen the guy who calls everyone stalker sockpuppets, tags all the admins and starts harassing you with his own sockpuppets whenever he gets a downvote?
Who really cares? Everyone isn’t going to have your option, if you really like it up vote it, if it pisses you off or something down vote it. Hell down vote the hell out of this post, it’s fake internet points for fucks sake.
But yeah, it’s weird as shit to have nothing else to do in your day/life and get so pissed at an opposing opinion that you scour through someone’s history. Get a hobby or something.
It depends. If someone is being very vague about describing a gripe, going back through their history helps get context into what they’re complaining about.
Without context? Yeah.
I downvote for lazy spelling, and there’s no way to indicate that. I’ll accept if I downvote a positive idea and in doing so make it seem like I disagree with the positive message instead of just the broken medium, but I’d rather not.
Yes, the internet is filled with weirdos - next question
No I’m spartacus
No! I’m Spartacus
Yeah. I did it though. Wish I hadn’t but shitty pattern seeking brain was like “but what if something interesting happens? What if you have an arch enemy”
No such luck, but it turns out there’s a few accounts who just downvote everything indiscriminately and that’s a little funny
The doing it doesn’t bother me so much as the “Hey so I was browsing through my downvotes and noticed you downvoted me. Justify your actions to me!” PMs.
Like - I don’t even know who you are or what you’re talking about. Thanks for the research project so I can piece together all these disparate pieces of information so I can figure out wtf you’re even talking about.
They are insane people.
The doing it doesn’t bother me so much as the “Hey so I was browsing through my downvotes and noticed you downvoted me. Justify your actions to me!” PMs.
That is not healthy behavior.
Oh. Yeah that’s fuggin weird. Did somebody do that to you? How fragile.
Yeah. Not sure I’m proud of the response but I hadn’t given my self much time to think before responding…
I’m not judging. Weird conversation to be forced to have, hope they grow out of it
“Hey so I was browsing through my downvotes and noticed you downvoted me. Justify your actions to me!” PMs.
Yeah that’s a instant block lol
I was curious who the single down vote on every cat post was so I checked. It was a bunch of different people. I’m still confused.
No arch enemies either? Want to be mine? We can downvote and reply-guy eachother until everyone’s uncomfortable
When enough people see something someone is likely to either dislike it or fat finger the down vote button accidentally. Nothing to overthink.
I always think the single random downvote on an uncontroversial comment or post is odd, so sometimes I check into those. A few times it’s been from some account that has like 3 comments from 18 months ago and no activity since. Still scratching my head over those ones.
They’re probably scrolling on mobile and did it accidentally.
People downvote for absolutely stupid reasons. It’s original intention was for handling trolls and off topic content but most of these people just use it as a ‘dislike’ button. These days more than ever, I feel like it’s something that should just be done away with because it gets proven over and over again that it only really ever gets used in bad faith anyway, and therefore adds nothing of value to the platform.
That’s why I’m quite happy on an instance with downvotes simply disabled. Personally, between Reddit and Lemmy I’ve probably purposely downvoted about five things, when a person doesn’t know when to end an ‘argument’ and just becomes a troll.
Last time I was more active here, I did end up getting into the habit of checking votes and honestly, it just makes me want to block people, even if they haven’t been downvoting me. If you’re the kind of person that goes around downvoting everything all day for stupid fucking reasons, you’re probably an unlikeable, insufferable turd in ‘real’ life too.
After spending the last year or so exploring mainstream social media, one of the biggest differences between Facebook and Instagram, is that Facebook has multiple reacts. And certain people, notably men, love to use the laugh react to bully people. You’ll find laugh reacts on everything from a trans person posting a selfie, to feminist pages posting about rape and abuse stats. On Instagram, the bigots are still there in the comment sections but they’re a lot easier to ignore because there’s a lot less noise in that regard, on how they’re allowed to react to things.
After this experience, I 100% believe that the people who rely on the downvote button so much on platforms like this and Reddit, are actually exactly the same kind of fucking people that laugh react news stories about rape. Stupid, mean, cruel, stupid people who can’t spar with their stupid ideas, so all they have is a panic button to make them feel better.
I’ll look at some users who post a ridiculous take on something. I mostly look to see if they are just a shitty troll or if it was a one off and decide if I want to block them. I don’t look through there posts for context, just the raw vote numbers. If someone is majority negative on their posts, then they don’t need to show up in my feed.
There are a handful of other users on here who I see frequently that I don’t agree with on a lot of things, and the community agrees with me based on votes, but those users also make good comments that are beneficial to some conversations and sometimes I learn something new. I’ll put up with the bad for the good.
I’m with you there. I don’t block for disagreement, I block for assholery
It really comes down to whether or not I think someone is arguing in bad faith, but there’s a fine line between bad faith and complete idiocy. Like, if someone is a hardcore trump supporter, they could argue in good faith, but we are so far apart that there really is no discussion to be had. I can’t fathom any situation where anyone could support him without being a pedophile and/or a billionaire business owner. Then there are trolls that will just use strawman arguments to move the goalposts on any topic just to not be wrong, and that shit just isn’t worth ingesting, ever.
