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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?

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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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