I’ll look at some users who post a ridiculous take on something. I mostly look to see if they are just a shitty troll or if it was a one off and decide if I want to block them. I don’t look through there posts for context, just the raw vote numbers. If someone is majority negative on their posts, then they don’t need to show up in my feed.

There are a handful of other users on here who I see frequently that I don’t agree with on a lot of things, and the community agrees with me based on votes, but those users also make good comments that are beneficial to some conversations and sometimes I learn something new. I’ll put up with the bad for the good.

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

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.

Yes, the internet is filled with weirdos - next question

You should immediately block everyone who disagrees with you. Then all of your BS will be eternally enabled and you’ll never be wrong about anything.

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.

Yes, those people are creepy.

How do you even see who down votes?