YouveCatToBeKittenMe

why would anyone obsess about tracking down which account liked which post?

Normal people wouldn't. Unfortunately, there are a lot of assholes, stalkers, and people who are salty they got downvoted and want revenge.

Ever seen people on Reddit say "Whoever downvoted this, go fuck yourselves?" I can guarantee that, if they knew who downvoted them, they wouldn't keep their reaction contained to an edited comment.

To add to what other people said: As a casual user who didn't go deliberately looking for bots, I mostly caught them when they posted a comment that was a complete non sequitur to the comment they replied to, like they were posted in the wrong thread. Which, well, is because they were--they were copied from elsewhere in the comment section and randomly posted as a reply to a more prominent thread. Ctrl+F came in very handy there. (They do sometimes reword things, but generally only a couple of words, so searching for bits and pieces of their comment still usually turns up results.)

Also, the bot comments I caught were usually just a line or two, not entire paragraphs, even if they were copied from a longer comment.

Ah, I missed that one when I was looking at the settings. That's what I get for trying to solve a problem early in the morning, lol. I'm not OP, but thanks for solving that mystery.

It's there for me, so it's something on your end (or a bug that only affects some people). I don't see anything in the settings that would affect it, so I have no idea what happened, but for a short-term bandaid, this is the link to the magazines page.

A couple of other resources that might help: Here's a site tracking migrated subreddits (both officially-migrated and unofficially duplicated) across the internet, and this site lets you search for communities across a bunch of Lemmy instances..

I remember being good at google-fu, and then thinking my google-fu was failing me.

No, it was the Google that failed me.

I see it.

Edit: In my subs feed. /m/TodayILearned.

I personally think making people explain why they downvoted something is more conducive than just....being dogpiled with no explanation.

There are very shy people like me who have to sit and work up their courage to post any comment, much less a dissenting one. (Edit: Or else yolo it and regret it later, like I kind of did with this one.) I'd have at least 4x (probably closer to 10x) the number of comments I have back on Reddit if I posted every comment I wrote and then ended up chickening out and not posting. And I've never commented on a heated thread where I disagreed with the popular opinion (or, at least, not about me disagreeing).

Anonymous upvotes and downvotes allow shy cowards like me to express our opinions in a small way without the fear of being attacked for them. Are they abused by assholes? Yes, but everything is. Assholes shit on everything, it's their way. Like I said in another comment, though I wouldn't be happy about it, I'd be willing to compromise by letting mods see voting history to prevent rampant abuse.

if having to downvote out loud makes people think twice because they don't want anyone knowing they disagree with X, maybe that's a good habit to reassess.

I don't want anybody knowing I, personally, disagree with X because I might be harassed for it, but I want people to know that somebody disagrees with it and they're not just in a big circlejerk. I said in another comment under this post that I used to be in a subreddit where I belatedly discovered a large number of people despised my favorite character and thought people who liked him were bad people because they liked him, or liked him because they were bad people, or something, I don't know. Either way, I certainly wasn't brave or stupid enough to go in there and argue, but being able to downvote the worst comments--before I realized how prevalent they were and left the sub--gave me some measure of agency there. I wouldn't be able to do the same thing here.

The best argument I've seen for anonymizing it is having that information appropriated by corporations. Which admittedly they could just gather from your posts if they wanted to.

With anonymized voting, if you're careful to not say anything that gives away your location, they're not going to pinpoint where you are, beyond a broad area. With public voting, if you go to your town's magazine and upvote a bunch of stuff, they're going to know exactly where you are. That goes for anything else you might not want them or anyone else to know about you. They can certainly build a more complete psychological profile with both your comments and your voting history than with just your comments. And I know a lot of people don't care about privacy anymore, and I think that's a tragedy.

Same here; I change my mind about upvotes/downvotes all the time (especially since I have the terrible habit of voting while I'm still reading the comment), but the ones I've done that for are still there. Heck, the first couple I see when I look at my profile are ones I did that for. Read half the comment, upvoted out of the corner of my eye while I was still reading, read the second half, went "Hoo boy, nevermind," and un-voted.

Related to that, upvotes/downvotes being public is a dealbreaker for me. I don't feel safe upvoting or downvoting anything here unless it's completely uncontroversial, because I don't want to open myself up to harassment by people who disagree.

I'll hang around for a bit to see if that changes, but I'm very unlikely to stick around if it doesn't.