I was part of the group that got banned yesterday, and I need to apologize to you all.
I have seen people mention previously that sometimes mods take upvotes for agreement, but I haven't trained myself to stop the reddit habit of voting on "food for thought" things, useful-addition-to-the-conversation-but-not-my-pov posts, and placemarkers in active threads, and there aren't downvotes here to easily mark the shitty stuff I want to come back to and learn from. I should always be opening things in new tabs instead.
I foolishly upvoted this comment as a "food for thought" comment and planned to come back to the thread yesterday evening to find it and read the responses and learn from them. instead my upvote counted as agreement and got me banned, which I know is my fault for not adapting to site culture and not foreseeing how that would be interpreted.
I totally understand, feel like the worst kind of fool, and spent my ban time thinking about what a piece of shit I am. far worse than that is the thought that any of you might think I agree with that comment, so I am posting here to apologize profusely and publicly for my upvote. I'm really, truly, terribly sorry, and idk what to do to about it except fuck off and try not to be such a fuckhead in the future.
explanation (not excuse) for those who care to understand why
I live in Ohio, which is immersed in the kind of chud culture that comment was talking about – I see my formerly borderline leftist little brother slipping into it, and it kills me. it's a point of view I remember seeing a lot when I was in DSA and not liking then, but I lack the information and wisdom to effectively articulate my problems with it. I very much want to understand what to do about it and how to talk about this stuff with people who believe it, but I get why it was offensive and shitty to mark it for myself in a way that would default mean "this is good" to others instead of pushing back on it at all or just opening it in a new tab to look at later. I'm very sorry about doing that.
I didn't open it in a new tab because I'm pushing triple digits of tabs open and knew it would be easy to find later because the Amber bot was inflating the comment activity. I keep forgetting to be judicious with my upvotes because I'm AuDHD and unlearning a decade of reddit habits is hard.
you didn't know that was why I upvoted it, it just looked to you like a bunch of your alleged comrades liked that post, and I was one of them. I hope you can forgive me, but I understand if it made you think differently about me. I get it, and I'm just really, really sorry.
as soon as I figured out that I was banned and why, I sent a version of this via DM from my old account to an em_poc user who is very near and dear to my heart, but I don't feel right only apologizing to one person when so many of you could have been hurt by my upvote, hence this post. I'm sorry that my apology to the rest of you wasn't that immediate, but I was worried that posting it from my old account would be seen as ban evasion and make my contrition seem insincere.
I appreciate very much the kindness and compassion so many of you have shown me, and it is devastating to know that I have repaid it in this way.
I'm very, very, very sorry.
please heap your scorn and excoriation here.
No, people said that upvotes weren't endorsement and constantly circlejerked about how Reddiquette (
) says you only downvote things that don't contribute to discussion. How they were used in practice and are used here as well is as an agree/disagree button. When something gets upbears here, I assume that people agree with it. And I don't upvote shitty things because I don't want others to think that people agree with them.
This is how I use the site. Basically anything that doesn't merit
or 
has an upvote because I don't really assign any weight or meaning to them. If anything it's a marker of engagement, showing that people have actually read the comment. Another factor for me is the long running "all posting is good posting" bit.
I also use it in an assistive capacity to keep track of what I have and haven't viewed. It makes the site much easier to parse.
If there's serious concern over this then we should have a community discussion about how we use upbears and how they should be used going forward. To the best of my knowledge there has never been such a discussion and I assume everyone is using them in their own way according to their personal needs.
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The thought that someone would just go through upvoting every comment they see (more or less) is wild to me. Yeah, I can see why you would be concerned about bans for upvotes.
"all posting is good posting" is/was/has been a joke for years. I don't really remember but I thought that was part of why we kept upvotes instead of doing away with voting entirely, because of that joke about just upvoting everything without much thought.