Be honest, do you trawl a user profile to downvote/upvote when you see a comment you dislike/goes against your beliefs?

https://lemmy.world/post/2907222

Be honest, do you trawl a user profile to downvote/upvote when you see a comment you dislike/goes against your beliefs? - Lemmy.world

Saw this a lot on Reddit. Its not specific to here, just trying to gauge how people think. I’d see people posting about how “X said this! Have you seen what else they said in their site history?” And a stream of votebombing would happen. I also wonder if this behaviour went the other way. Bias was confirmed, so profiles get a little boost? There are sites that hide posts and comments after a certain number of downvotes, but these always seemed to get the engagement even after.

Knowing that up and downvotes are public (on the user profile) I avoid voting at all. I think it’s bad design and really hinders my engagement with posts.
Why?
Because people like OP end up stalking you and downvote everything you post.
But downvotes are fake and there is no karma. Who cares if someone is downvoted?
A) I dont do that, please do not suggest that B) I’m trying to establish what someone gains from such behaviour. Otherwise you cant counter it. This is part of the reason people leave Reddit and other sites.

This comment says it all.

To illustrate op’s point I’m going to spin up an instance, federate with everyone, and not tell anyone what that instance is.

Then I’m going to feed all that data into my new website, called Open Lemmy Stats, where anyone can query the user data ive accumulated. The homepage will be ripe with insights, leaderboards and all kinds of data on prolific users.

Additionally, I’ll display a snapshot/profile of a random user by feeding that users data to GPT4 to make inferences about the user’s political affiliations and display the results.

Worst of all, I’m not going to out my instance for everyone to know it as the one to defederate. In fact I’m spinning up a few instances that will host innocuous communities that I plan to mod and support to give my instances cover for their true purpose: redundant fediverse datastreams for my site, Open Lemmy Stats.

I’ll also have a store where anyone can buy my collected fediverse data for a handsome sum.

Just kidding I’m not doing any of this. But someone absolutely will or already is.

Just read a relevant comment here to add to this (no idea if this will work) [sh.itjust.works/comment/2013252]
Do posts from instances that don't allow downvotes have an unfair advantage? - sh.itjust.works

By advantage I mean posts from those instances receiving more visibility than others on feeds that sort by score (active, hot, top). There seems to be at least two ways in which posts from instances that don’t allow downvotes receive an advantage: - They don’t federate downvotes. That means other instances only count downvotes from their own users but not from the rest of the fediverse. - A downvote sometimes can be counted and federated as an upvote. This happens when you first upvote a post and then change it to a downvote. Let’s see an example. Suppose we are a user from instance A that allows downvotes and we want to vote a post on instance B that doesn’t allow downvotes. Watch what happens on instance C that also allows downvotes. 1) Before the vote this is what users from each instance see (upvote - downvote = total score) A: 10 - 0 = 10 B: 10 - 0 = 10 C: 10 - 0 = 10 2) Now we upvote the post: A: 11 - 0 = 11 B: 11 - 0 = 11 C: 11 - 0 = 11 3) We misclicked, we meant to downvote the post: A: 10 - 1 = 9 B: 11 - 0 = 11 C: 11 - 0 = 11 If the post was hosted on an instance that allowed downvotes users from instance C would see a total score of 9.