Why does it seem that on larger platforms there are bots that downvote comments?
You can tell it’s bots because all the downvotes happen at the same time. I can guess for astroturfing purposes one would want to upvote their targeted comments and downvote all others but on lemmy?
You look at it as a social media platform. The people who run bot accounts, have specific goals they want to achieve such as swaying public opinion on a specific topic. They could have been paid by a corporation to do damage control on a negative event that happened.
When they downvote you and upvote their other bots, their content gets higher visibility.
And even the votes themselves can help sway public opinion to a small degree.
An otherwise popular opinion may appear less popular if it has a few bot-made downvotes attached to it.
Why, I haven’t been so insulted in my life, being compared to a bot. It’s me.
I’m not so sure about that
And your four-thousand clones.
The instance admin can see votes. If you are noticing a pattern maybe ask them to confirm? There can be delays in federation so you might see them all come in at once even if they occurred quite a bit earlier.
I know your question was “why” but maybe confirming that is that is happening vs a different cause can be the first step.
Everyone can see votes: https://lemvotes.org/
Unfortunately it doesn’t work, returns 404 for everything
It has definitely worked for me in the past, maybe it broke recently :(
I’m convinced its often the admins that the bots belong to.
I don’t care about the downvotes. I intentionally view ALL posts in the feed, I don’t hide anything just because of low score. The lowest score might be the best!
The lowest score might be the best!
Especially in certain communities.
