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I'm starting to see some serious downsides to being able to see who downvotes you. (kbin.social)

submitted 11 months ago by billothekid2@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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A few days ago I downvoted someone's comment, and the next day I happened to notice every single comment I've ever made had at least one downvote. All from the person I dared to downvote the ONE time. I straight up asked why they did it, and they seem to think I'm an "obvious" troll account that "apparently just exist to downvote other people". I assure you I'm no troll account, and ironically don't really downvote all that often.
I know the topic of public downvotes has been discussed before, but I never used to care either way. Now I'm kinda leaning in the "I don't like it" side. Honestly, I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a little offended, maybe even attacked. Also, there goes all my imaginary internet points. Lol
Has anyone else had something like this happen to them, or am I just unlucky?

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[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Assuming you're being sarcastic and mean the opposite, this hasn't been my experience, actually. Just like with @livus, above, I called out a downvote-stalker once who'd been following me around and when I described how I was seeing his downvote pattern he instantly vanished. In my experience the "downvote warriors" are a cowardly bunch, they love being able to throw punches without being seen to throw punches. Once you make it clear to them that everyone can see what they're doing they crumple under scrutiny.

The trolls you're talking about are the kind that love to get into an argument with you. That's quite different.

[–] magnetosphere@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Okay. Yeah, I was being sarcastic, but now I see we had different kinds of trolls in mind. Thanks for taking the time to explain.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago

No problem. And I can imagine that there might be some out there who would indeed be gleeful about being called out for downvoting because they're just that deep into the "raging asshole" state that any negative attention is giving them the dopamine hit they crave. But I suspect that kind of troll is going to be blatant enough that he'll get blocked or banned by most places worth hanging out in anyway.

I probably shouldn't admit it, but one of my favourite ways of dealing with a raging asshole on Reddit was to be impeccably polite to them until they blew their stack badly enough while trying to provoke me that I could report them. :) I'd only do that if they were clearly already unredeemable, though.

[–] livus@kbin.social 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

@FaceDeer interesting, wonder if it was the same person!

The other thing that hasn't bern mentioned yet is vote manipulation is easy to spot on kbin.

When reddit first migrated here I remember someone being called out for having 3 or 4 profiles upvote/downvote all the same things.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago

Could be, I have no clue what their name was. I feel the worst fate for such people is to be irrelevant so I try to forget about them. :)

Yeah, the ability to spot vote manipulation is a nice one. The current interface for kbin makes it laborious to click through so many comments and posts to check, but once the API is settled it should be possible to write some nice tools for that kind of thing.