No Stupid Questions

It's certainly a waste of time.

I only do that with accounts that are sus, like posting propaganda, ads, etc. To check if it is a bot and to report it.

"I went through your post history and so now I feel confident stereotyping you" is a borderline temp ban red flag, imo. It definitely indicates that the person is tilted hard enough, for one reason or another, to not take the discussion rationally and maybe need a break. If your community excludes certain harmful opinions then a post history check can be helpful for moderation, but using it to ad hominem someone in a discussion forum where all the important information should be in the discussion is flame war tactics and can lead to stalking.

Usually doesn't happen here to the degree it happens on reddit, but literally this week I had someone do it to try and claim that I hate cars because I post in /c/fuckcars@lemmy.world, even though I myself own two cars. Indeed, it was a stupid topic that dependably gets some people irrationally incensed, which primed this guy to try and make it personal.

Sometimes I'll check post and comment history if something seems a little off. For example, does this account show patterns you might see in a troll or bot?

Looking at votes though? That never even occurred to me, and even know I don't see what the point would be.

The only "creepy" thing about it is that viewing who upvoted/downvoted what isn't a feature that's just built into Lemmy (and Lemmy-UI). I can't imagine why the authors of Lemmy would want to have a class system with some (instance admins) being able to see vote information and others (everyone else) being unable.

You say "we all know our votes here are public record", but that's not really true. Even Lemvotes doesn't work for at least half of the posts I've tried it on. It'd be more accurate to say "we all know our votes here aren't secret".

I used to ban people who repeatedly downvoted content on my conservative community but the last couple months I’ve stopped doing that and it hasn’t changed the vibe of the community at all.

I think its something I would have to encounter, and encounter enough, to be wierded out. If people do this I have no idea about it. I mean if Im thinking of blocking someone I look at their profile but that is mostly about comment and post history. I guess I should look and up and down voting because if someone is obviously brigrading I think I would want to block them.

I don't care, just seems like a waste of time and a bit childish IMO.
It's been a long time since it happened last, but I have experienced users claiming they have me flagged for something.
And sometimes when taken out of context a post can seem bad, but the times it has happened, the opinion quickly turned against them when they "called me out", and I explained the background.
I basically never see that anymore, IDK maybe I blocked them? Because generally those people are idiots.

The only time I check is to try and catch if I'm being targeted by someone mass down voting me or using alts to do so. Only when I'm seeing weird stuff like every one of my comments for a while getting at least one downvote, or seeing my comments deep in a one on one conversation on an otherwise dead thread getting multiple downvotes (no one's going to even see those except me and who I'm talking to).

Unfortunately, this has been a "you're only paranoid if they aren't out to get you" situation. Most give up after a day or two and I just block and move on, but it was a bit common for a few months.

I caught one of the "respected" members of my instance pulling that shit, a person who moderates multiple comms, downvoting me using their alts over multiple instances.

They accused me of doxxing them (they were actually around that time). Now I have a bunch of bans in my modlog saying that I used a slur, when I was quoting the name of an ancient meme and I edited the word out long before they did the bans.

TIL

WTFC

TMDV