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.

  • wmrch@lemmy.world
    133·
    11 months ago

    Knowing that up and downvotes are public (if not on the user profile through the API, so any crawler/3rd party app has access afaik) I avoid voting at all. I think it’s bad design and really hinders my engagement with posts.

      • wmrch@lemmy.world
        9·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • UnD3Rgr0uNDCL0wN@lemmy.worldOP
          2·
          11 months ago

          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.