Summary:
I downvoted pro-AI comments in a post in leftymemes community. It was LLM generated polandball comic (Which is objectively pathetic as fuck) that showed up on my feed, blocked couple of users who I thought were unhinged, and have blocked the whole instance on my client after realizing how rabid these morons are.
I didn't go looking for AI posts like a vigilante.
One user in question got miffed for being downvoted and banned me from places they moderate.
Yes, I think it's bad. I mean some people have it coming and I'm not mad at you for downvoting those. But a bunch of people do what you do. And once you're part of a niche community or one about a controversial topic, you tend to get that a lot. Random people wo aren't members coming by and leaving some negative drive-by comment, or a bunch of downvotes. And most of the time it's not a well-informed take. Or it's been debunked countless times already, or not even the specific topic at hand. But more someone pushing their uninformed opinion or the prevalent sentiment... And I mean how would they know it they don't know a lot about what's going on, since it's just someone browsing the "All" feed and leaving drive-by interactions?
The issue is not you doing it or one person. But that quite some people do it. And at the other end it's just a constant stream of it. And if you want to discuss something you then have to make the rules more strict, start to ban people. And then it might lead to some outcry on yepowertrippingbastards or something like that. I think it's just a lose-lose situation for everyone. It doesn't create anything constructive or with substance to it. Main thing it does is drag down the place and poison the atmosphere. I'd rather you just block the community if you don't like the content, and move on with your day.
Make of this what you will. I also downvote misinformation and bad content. But rarely do I scroll through something just to vote on it or make my opinion known to everybody. (With some minor exceptions.)
I think the main difference is that I don't see downvoting terrible stuff as the same thing as downvoting positive stuff.
There is a lot of nuance to it. I'd say receiving one downvote feels as annoying as it feels good to receive 5 upvotes. At least to me, so I'd say downvotes are worth more. But yeah, this is kind of a different topic. Upvoting bad stuff or downvoting good stuff is both very stupid. But this isn't a competition or an excercise in stupidity. Just downvote bad/terrible content and upvote if you think other people might want to read it, too. And use your brain before using the voting system for different purposes than those.