• So that number three spot is suspect to me too. I would’ve assumed a lot of users over time would have broken -4000.

    There are two explanations that come to my mind.

    I’ve only been running my own instance for a couple of months at this point, and so I only have the history from then on. Anything older and my instance wouldn’t know about it since it didn’t exist to receive that info.

    The second one - we’re seeing changes now with the downvoting process. I personally use pyfedi ( flagship instance is at piefed.social ) - and pyfedi is, erm, opinionated. For example, by design, it automatically hides posts and comments in it’s UI if the downvotes are too negative (by default a score of -20 or greater, though this is configurable by the admin). Pyfedi also implemented anonymous downvoting, but users whose reputation are too low (based on how many downvotes they are getting) won’t be able to use this feature.

    In short, being downvoted all the time is starting to bite. So my guess is that folks who do this might be changing accounts in order to avoid too negative a score in an attempt to avoid some of these consequences.