Posting
[ALL] I think I'm being stalked by a downvote bot
It doesn't matter whatever subreddit I'm in. The instant I post, it goes immediately to 0. Instead of the default 1, which is how it should be.
I check my insights on that same post and my upvote percentage would be at 0% instead of the default 100%. Meaning someone or something is deliberately downvoting me. Why I have a stalker? I have no idea why. But it's annoying since I woukd post a comment to answer an OP, but it will be hidden because of a bot.
I tried everything to disabling followers, making my post history hidden, blocking suspected users, reporting one of my comments for vote manipulation. But nothing seems to work.
I can guarantee you this post would be hit by an automatic 0 as well. How the hell do I shake off this bot?
Proving that there’s a downvote bot stalking you would likely be impossible. While they do supposedly exist, I would have to assume that Reddit has things that monitor for that, or at least I would hope they do.
Unfortunately, the best thing you can do is ignore it. You have a decent amount of karma, so they can’t really harm your account with a single downvote.
I was hoping there was a way for me to contact the Admins for it to report, but yeah it would be hard to prove it unless they have data that tracks votes.
This all started two weeks ago and I've been trying to find a way to get rid of it ever since. But I guess all there really is to it is continuing to ignore it.
It might not even be a bot. It literally could be a person that is just that bored and annoying. With luck though, they’ll get bored with following you around and move on.
This might be a stretch, but someone on Discord told me that it could also most likely be someone using a script targeted at me. So that probably won't happen.
As I said in my first post, they supposedly exist. You can even google it and find references to them. Do they work? No idea, never tried. Since it’s only been a few weeks, it could take some time for Reddit’s systems to catch up to it.
You can try to report it. You’ll need to use the website though.
Paste a link to one of your own comments that you feel is being targeted
On the next screen, at the very bottom choose “Vote manipulation” which is:
REPORT REASON
Vote manipulation
Any manual or programmatic attempt to cheat or manipulate Reddit’s voting system.
On the next screen add any addition information that might help, such as a rough time line. You can also add a few more links to posts/comments that you think are targeted.
Yeah it is a rare bug. Here’s how to tell if you have it. Look at the insights of a new post or comment and pay attention to the upvote ratio %.
Every post and comment you make shows a score of 1 from your own automatic upvote by default.
If 1 account then downvoted you, it would show 0 on the post score and 50% upvote ratio. 2 accounts downvoted, you would be at a 33% upvote ratio. So on and so forth, but even 50 downvotes would not drop you to 0% upvote ratio. And vote fuzzing would not reflect 0% either. It’s not counting your default vote at all.
Yeah this has been an interesting problem, especially since there’s been a big spike in people reporting legit voting issues in recent months. The latter seems to have calmed down since 1-2 weeks ago.
Yeah, it's weird. A lot of people on here just like to take out their anger on strangers with no repercussions. I agree after some experimentation that there is indeed something strange going on with your account. I would try contacting the admins (though I'm not 100% sure how to do that. Might have to Google it). I hope you get it figured out. Not only is it annoying for you, but it portends some bad things ahead for this site
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