Council would like to present to the court our findings in relation to user blindkermit@lemmy.dbzer0.com who has accumulated an astounding 16427 downvotes compared to 222 upvotes.
With an account that’s been live for three years, we, the prosecution, are at our wit’s end trying to determine what, if anything, this user truly enjoys. Perhaps this extended self-flaggelation in the form of content consumption is a punishment, either for them or for the users of our dear platform. Who can say?
What we can say is that this egregious crime deserves no less than the maximum sentence for this class of offence, and strongly encourage the court to agree.
Your honor, I would like to illuminate the court as to what my thought process towards the relationship between this platform, its content and voting systems have been.
I primarily use upvotes as a way to mark content that I personally enjoy or appreciate enough that I would like to see again. Naturally, this leads to a far lower amount of comments being upvoted by me, because people tend to mostly say silly things that don’t have as much impact on me as seeing someone post a cool or cute drawing they made.
As for downvotes, the reasons are a bit more varied. I will downvote posts and comments based on things like the content being clickbait or a scam, an article source being a tabloid or otherwise low-quality, a person who tries to argue in bad faith, seems to be trolling or espouses an especially egregious stance on a topic.
Most recently I have added news articles that use a variation of X says Y to Z as a headline to what I consider clickbait, because articles and their titles should ideally focus on the tangible action behind someone’s words over the words themselves. Unfortunately, this has led to many posts being downvoted by me, even if the content may otherwise be sound, but I do not mean it as a personal attack. It’s more of a frustration toward the current state of journalim that has led to these kind of titles being so ubiquitous.
I will admit to some pettiness on my part, where, if I have noticed someone repeatedly post or comment content that I find irksome, I will look at their most recent 20 or however many my Lemmy app shows me, posts or comments and downvote them before blocking a person.
My downvotes average out to a bit over 15/day, which is actually lower than I expected.
I have generally been a lurker in various forums for most of my internet existence, but I have been trying to interact more. When I made this account three years ago, I would never have made this comment at all.
I wanted to provide some context behind my actions and am willing to accept whatever sentence the court decides.