if a user takes it upon themselves to painstakingly downvote everything i post..

Uncheck this box in your settings and move on to focus on things that actually matter.

Yes, admins can see all the votes.

You're kind of a downvote collector so it wasn't easy, but I didn't actually see all that much brigading. Seeing some repeat usernames and one occurrence that looks like someone did go through your profile and downvote most comments about a certain topic once, but that's all I could find. Most set of downvotes are confined to a given post.

You're really just getting downvoted a lot by a lot of different people. Your downvotes on this post have nothing in common with your other downvotes.

EDIT: Nevermind, there is indeed 2 people downvoting every comment from OP.

There are a half dozen or so people that cause 90% of all negative behavior according to an admin on another instance. LW does not seem to take responsibility and act to stop these 0.0001% of bad users.

Mods can't see jack ****. Only admin see that info.

Unfortunately LW doesn't take updating the Lemmy version seriously either. The server version is WAY behind and the very next version of Lemmy adds the ability to turn off all negative votes at the user level. That single feature would likely improve the mental health of most LW users substantially.

Like everybody around here, I get random downvotes too but I've yet to see anyone harassing that poor downvote button against my previous messages (I would not be surprised if this changed right after I publish this comment).

A few times, I 've seen multiple posts of mine get downvoted in a row in some thread. I supposed it was the action of someone disagreeing with me and wanting to 'punish' me for our diverging opinions but I could not tell, and I don't care much either.

Much more than knowing someone may not like what I said, I'm interested in knowing their reasons why they disagree with what I said, or how I said it (even more so that I'm still learning English, so any remark can help me correct mistakes no matter how unpleasant the remark can be).

Alas, many people seem to think downvoting is enough an argument to say out loud they disagree with someone and to demonstrate how wrong they're. It is not, at least not for me. I don't know about them but I only write what I think, and what I think doesn't change with the direction of the wind, or with the amount of + or - votes it receives. It can change when I'm faced with convincing arguments.

But arguments require a tad more work to share than just hitting the downvote button. Work not that many people seem to be willing to do.

This isn't Reddit. Karma points would matter if it was reddit because they stupidly make it where the less points you got, the harder it'll be to post anywhere. That isn't a thing on the fediverse, you can have -1000 and still post.

It's just a stupid internet toy.

I don't think DVs matter all that much. Actual interaction (comments) is much more rewarding. I think DV are more about knowing reach—who has read a comment or post to interact with it. If you get no votes and no comments you might wonder if it's worth the effort if no one is seeing them.

Someone else suggested not showing DV separately, but I suggest the opposite. 10 UV and 8 DV look like only 2 UV but you actually had ten people like your post. So mine are split and I only really pay attention to UV. Particularly on the occasions when I know I'm saying something unpopular and I'm going to get DV, those UV are the folks who silently agree but maybe didn't want to take the heat for saying a thing.

Beyond that, if folks are responding to you with comments, even insightful disagreements, IMO that's a much more rewarding interaction.

And lastly, maybe look at your posting habits. If this is a big problem for you, it might be worth examining if there's something you ought to do differently.

It's something that an instance owner has visibility of.

I don't know if discovering who does this will help, since I don't believe that blocking that account by you will stop their voting behaviour.

It's something that appears to be pretty common.

I suspect that there are people who believe that every post should start at zero and have bots running to make it so.

You could start your own instance if you had the energy to go head to head with this, but I wouldn't bother.

Voting is really just a way to indicate how far off the reservation a post has strayed.

Mods? No. Admins? Yes. But as even my own experience at the hands of the masses shows, that doesn't mean they'll take sides.

From what I've heard, admins can't really do anything about repeat offenders / downvote trolls because of something about scanning through databases or something. But then I also saw a post yesterday about how Friendica reveals the usernames of people who upvote and downvote, so it seems like that information is accessible in the API or framework of the Fediverse.

Just turn off voting, it's a net negative.

That is something that follows me, too. There seems to be a person petty enough to give a downvote to about everything I post. Must be a really sad and lonely existence to have nothing better to do than that.