Mildly Infuriating

Sticking my neck out a bit to share my general views and habits on voting to maybe add some other things to consider.

My general mindset is that each community sets rules on posts and comments, and that ideally only appropriate things should then be posted. So I typically only think to upvote stuff when there's an even greater than normal amount of effort or thought put into something, or to counteract dogpile downvotes to an appropriate post/comment.

Say I'm browsing a motorcycle community and one user posts a meme about bikes, and someone else poses a story about learning to ride; if my preference is for text posts instead of images I could just upvote the story post and not the meme, but both posts are related to the community and belong there. I could upvote both (and by extension all posts) but then what's the difference if everything is +1 or +0? If memes are disallowed, I can downvote and report the post to push it down to hopefully keep others from having to see it or encourage them to post their own.

I will also downvote nearly 100% of extremely low-effort pointless comments like "THIS", "lol", URL shortened or amp/tracking including links without context etc. A post in another language but marked as English I will also downvote, foreign language communities/instances I just block. I block most meme and shitpost style communities so I'm not looking to vote police what other people enjoy, but doing this stuff in science/news/hobby/etc. communities is inappropriate.

So that's generally how I behave on Lemmy (and previously on Reddit) - I'm generally more "on the lookout" for bad content, and not looking to boost things that belong here. I don't rely on voting to maintain my feed, my block lists are also enormous.

A more semi-recent phenomenon is accounts spam posting a bunch of (relevant) links and then self-deleting - I can't block that account to hide their posts, but as I'm scrolling through my feed I will downvote every single post they made regardless of its quality etc. I'm not going to rehash arguments about whether their behavior is acceptable or not ("they are posting relevant stuff, who cares if they're acting in bad faith!") but since there's generally 2-3 of those accounts per day spam posting junk that's a lot of downvotes from me to a lot of different communities including some I'm not subscribed to. I'm not going to bother reporting every single post, and until there's a method to easily directly report a user I'm not going to bother trying that anymore.

Just wanted to put that out there that there might be other legitimate users that have wildly disproportionate voting numbers and that it might not be malicious or careless in nature. I don't know if Lemmy ignores them like Reddit (supposedly?) does, but I've never mass voted from a user's history. It's only from comments and posts that were presented to me during my normal browsing.