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.
Post history can be a useful tool to help determine if someone’s asking questions in bad faith
True, but doesnt really establish how others react around them.
Or if you aren’t sure if someone is being sarcastic and forgot the /s.
I’ve also used it to try to find out what country someone was in when relevant to the discuss (ie, they’re talking about relevant laws in whatever jurisdiction they’re in)
Haha, many a time I’ve rescinded an up or down vote when I realised the comment was or wasn’t being satirical
This right here. I won’t go downvote/upvote their other comments, but I will get a vibe for the person themselves. Usually when I think someone is arguing in bad faith, I’ll check their comments to see if they’re just a troll or simply someone I’m disagreeing with. If they appear to conduct themselves in good faith in general, then instead of dismissing them as a troll, I’ll actually engage and try to learn more from their perspective. If it’s just a troll though, it’s pointless, so I’ll downvote the original comment and move on.
I read through the user profile to decide whether or not to block them. Don’t bother with voting from their profile.
Viewing the comment history of other people shouldn’t even be a feature, or at least optional. It made Reddit so incredibly toxic.
Same, post history should be optional.
It’s such a childish behavior to stalk someones history just to be able to dismiss their argument. It makes nuanced discussion between different camps so much harder and is a big reason why Reddit was so polarized.
On YouTube, everything is much more self contained, you only see like 3 comments of the same person on the same channel. It is much more refreshing to be there in my opinion.
Being on Reddit is like fighting with your toxic ex who constantly brings up something irrelevant you did 10 years ago.
The features a social network has very much influences the quality of the discourse. I would much rather Lemmy gives users much more fine grained control over these kinds of features. Like give users the option to hide their post/comment history, but then perhaps also let communities ban those users from commenting, let each community decide. Same with anonymous posting etc…
I see your point but I don’t agree with removing the post history or otherwise hiding it. For better or worse, post history is part of the social construct.
Think of it another way: hang out in a community long enough and you’ll have lived through the post history of other participants anyway.
I have seen this go badly and to reiterate I do appreciate the sentiment: I used to be very active on a Reddit wristwatch sub - people who had previously posted in subs related to counterfeit watches often got a hard time whenever they posted in other places (one sub in particular). It seemed that some commenters could never accept that some people had both “reps” and “gens”, or that some people wanted to have a good knowledge of “reps” (to avoid being fleeced on the second hand market, for instance).
Fortunately, there were enough level-headed folk (and more reasonable subs) that didn’t adopt this attitude.
We can choose to look or not look and we can choose whether to act or not act on what we find. And one way or the other the post history is there anyway.
You’re the only person I’ve ever heard say something positive about YouTube comments sections
depends on what channel you’re on
deleted by creator
Or it could go the other way - it could confirm the bias of others who have bad views of the world. It could actively connect them. And trolling is not always a bad thing, its been used in the past to tackle big corps who’ve fucked up for one thing.
deleted by creator
I’m sorry… you want Lemmy to be more like YouTube?
Because I think you might be in a minority of one there.
I can understand the argument that trawling through years worth of posts to see if someone ever said something naughty is a bad thing, because it doesn’t allow people to grow and change.
That being said, having very little or only a few innocuous comments means you can’t tell if someone is arguing in bad faith, and by the time you can tell in the discussion itself, they’ve already won. That, and in real life people have reputations for a reason. A clean slate for each and every comment (or a small group of comments) would lead to chan behavior, which is a net negative.
Something like 6 months of history, the most upvoted/downvoted/controversial comments (and of course their context) might be an alternative. I’m not sure how well hiding history and silencing users would work: that could just force trolls to make new accounts, which makes things worse.
Only when the person I argued with brings up something from my profile first. Was having an argument with someone who was claiming I’m misogynistic (can’t remember the context). Then they brought up something from my profile and I criticized them for the same. When I went through their profile they were giving suggestions to people about red light places to visit in the Phillipines…
Had a guy call me “boomer” online a couple of times. Had to point out that “boomer” was from “baby boomer” and those people were about 65 and over. Turned out he was in his 60s and the insult didnt register.
I pay no attention to post history when it comes to voting behaviour; posts are as they are. I’m not much of a downvoter; it’s upvote or nothing unless a post is straight up awful inappropriate for the community it is in.
If it’s a niche subject that I’m interested in, I look at their post history in case they’ve found discussions that I’ve missed.
If it’s a particularly good, funny, extreme or otherwise “out there” post I do look at the post history for entertainment value, learning or just morbid curiosity.
Typical attitude of someone who’s commented about rabbits. /s
Yeah well. Rabbits are cool.
Not to downvote them, that’s petty, but if they say something nuts, I do sometimes look at their history to see what other nuts things they’ve said.
I think we’ve all done that.
And i usually find that they’re actually pretty ok people with a few random kooky comments. We all have weird days and jokes or sarcasm that don’t land correctly.
I’ll admit I’ve done it to the Reddit admin that cheated on r/place last year
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.
Why?
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) [https://sh.itjust.works/comment/2013252]
Because people like OP end up stalking you and downvote everything you post.
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.
But downvotes are fake and there is no karma. Who cares if someone is downvoted?
deleted by creator
Only if they seem suspicious to me as trying to push some kind of idea. Usually posts with leading questions such as “anyone else notice the anecdotal negative experience portrayed as norm”, comments where someone blames a demographic for something, posts that are on topic but have a blatant other purpose meant to start shit (such as cat pics in c/cats held by soldiers), etc.
In too many cases, the user is really adamant about whatever they have to say, and I just end up blocking them.
No. That’s disgusting. I want to argue with arguments, not with people.
The most preferred way to engage with toxic people are to downvote the post/comment in question, report them, and block them. Trawling their history like that would make me even unhappier, voting being anonymous or not.
As others have said, I only look through someone’s profile if they’ve said something batshit insane because I want to see what else they’ve said. It’s why I sometimes scroll through conservative or religious communities on Lemmy if the post shows up in new. I don’t downvote, I just chuckle.
Wasn’t this called brigade down voting? At any rate, I never engaged in this behavior because it is petty
Brigading, yes.
Yeah, brigading is weak. Why effect someone else’s overall standing based on one disagreement? Happened all the time on reddit.
I’ve never heard of this referred to as brigading, but it’s definitely in the same spirit. Brigading usually means getting an external group of people to visit a post/comment solely to vote. It’s effectively crowdsourcing vote manipulation.
I don’t think voting down somebody’s profile counts as vote manipulation because you still only have one voice, but it’s still incredibly petty and I’ve heard Reddit even had a feature such that profile votes don’t affect karma, despite not being banworthy to my knowledge. As a rule of thumb I don’t check post history or even notice usernames because it doesn’t really matter to me, unless a profile is genuinely entertaining to go through.
I mainly look at profiles to see people’s avatars. I just think they’re neat.
