I don't mod any communities but I do put in the effort to curate my "All" feed and most of the users & communities I block come from those 2 instances. Toss hexbear on there and that’s almost 100%.
I specifically avoid all three of them as well, along with Beehaw.
That's weird. Someone else here in the comments section mentioned downvote bots, so it might be that (?)
It seems to be more prevalent on lemmy
I've noticed this with the two largest Lemmy instances -- .ml and .world.
it's still mildly-infuriating to see obviously innocuous/irreverent posts/comments being dogpiled
I think early downvoters are just trying to induce others to follow them because they're assholes and have nothing better to do. Unfortunately, it's pretty common with both Reddit and Lemmy.
Things were great when I first joined Lemmy a year ago -- it truly felt like a community -- but then unfortunately some of the same toxic Reddit-like behavior started to creep in.
I've since learned that if I avoid the two largest Lemmy instances, plus some of the more sketchy ones like Beehaw and Hexbear, for the most part it's good.
I had a Hexbear account for about a month, and noticed whenever I logged in or refreshed the webpage that someone else's username would momentarily appear at the top right of my desktop screen where mine would normally be, and then mine would appear.
This had never happened with any of my user accounts in other instances, and I was considering deleting it out of fear that my username (and, perhaps, login credentials) might somehow get compromised.
Anyway, I ended up deleting it for something else -- the very same reasons often mentioned in the comments here, after experiencing some of that toxic shit firsthand. Good riddance!
In the U.S., this kind of hypocrisy is so common that people apparently no longer notice it -- if they even did in the first place.