Oh wow. Just looked at the votes of a harmless happy post that had lots of upvotes and a few downvotes. With this tool, I was able to figure out who was that one downvoter. Well, then I dug a bit deeper, and found out that this user seems to be a serial downvoter. Every day, there's a proper barrage of downvotes directed at pretty much anything and everything.

I have very mixed feelings about this discovery. Kinda nice to know all this, but it certainly didn't make me happier.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 7 points 2 days ago

Every small-to-medium sized community trying to build will have a handful of users like this. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn't all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads.

Made a huge difference.

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's a nice tool for admins and mods, but then again they already pretty much had access to this information. I've always believed votes are obscured for good reason, and knowing how people vote on your posts and comments is only going to bring about negative emotions.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 day ago

Mods and admins need to know, but everyone else will just find sadness in this kind of data. I asked, but clearly wasn’t ready to hear the answer. Well, now I know where some of those seemingly random downvotes come from.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

But if your a community moderator, you can use this tool to identify the bad actors and uninvite them from the party.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago

You can already see votes directly in the Lemmy UI as a mod