Maybe I’m oversensitive? We all know our votes here are public record, but to me it seems like weird, obsessive, and unhealthy behavior.
It definitely is a red flag for me to the point where I wonder if I shouldn’t just outright block people who go around making it known it’s something the participate in.


Untrue. Even one on one’s in a public medium, are public. Lurkers have every right to opine on takes as they see fit, reply or platform-granted reaction tools both. Whether they catch the comments fresh or later when you consider it a “dead thread”.
I personally do it all the time, upvote or downvote.
There’s only so many hours in a day and Fediverse content isn’t so plentiful that it makes sense to mark discussions that are still near the top of a comms feed as “dead” to me.
That’s before we even get into how easy it is to accidentally hit the buttons in a lot of Lemmy client apps.
I’m well aware. I’m not talking about those situations. I’m talking ~20 comments deep on a thread that has seen no other action for multiple days. And I’m not talking about it just getting one downvote between when I reply from people happening to find it.
And even then, I just check. I’m not harassing people, I’m not jumping to immediately blocking. I’m just looking to see if it is something weird going on. If there is, I block.
And I haven’t done any of this since last year. No need.