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The voting and posting activity on threads heavily critical of the chinese government have seemed very suspect to me as well. Many of the names defending the government having post histories of only government defense and "what about other country" while votes end up going through cycles of rising gradually and being downvoted all at once.

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If you spend enough time in those threads to notice patterns, and even look through people's posting history, you're essentially acting like a bot crawling the site.

If you then downvote those posters you disagree with, it creates a very suspicious voting pattern on their end.

Could you distinguish your own behavior from that of a bot (or a bot-assisted human) if you didn't know it was just you in front of your screen?

That makes zero sense. I'm not dropping comments that have already been upvoted into negatives in seconds and I don't have a user name of random letters a few months old with only 4 or 5 comments, all defending the chinese government in heavily commented threads about a story critical of the chinese government.

Of course you're not dropping comments from +3 to -4 (or whatever) on your own, but it only takes six other people who share your opinion to do that. As for people with only 4 or 5 comments, they're not going to have enough karma to downvote anyone.

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