I used to downvote fairly often on Reddit as a sign to disagree or to push down really disgusting bigoted comments. And to be honest, it became a habit to just downvote without replying. However, now that I’m on lemmy and not Reddit I’ve been actively trying to not instantly downvote things and instead move on or take the time to reply. Has anyone else been trying to do this?
Votes being public has made it possible to learn a bit about how people interact with posts. I’ve always used the downvote sparingly and I think that is how most people operate, downvoting only what doesn’t contribute to discussion and upvoting what I agree with. But it seems a minority downvote very frequently. There are some accounts that downvote the vast majority of posts in certain communities. Sometimes these accounts have zero posts and comments. Which is pretty odd - disagreeing with so much while never sharing your opinion.
I didn’t bother to check who it is because I’m not petty enough, but there’s a guy on my instance who downvotes everything. I think some people are using downvotes to “hide read posts” as voting counts as reading a post.