Saw this a lot on Reddit. Its not specific to here, just trying to gauge how people think. I’d see people posting about how “X said this! Have you seen what else they said in their site history?” And a stream of votebombing would happen.
I also wonder if this behaviour went the other way. Bias was confirmed, so profiles get a little boost? There are sites that hide posts and comments after a certain number of downvotes, but these always seemed to get the engagement even after.
I’ve never heard of this referred to as brigading, but it’s definitely in the same spirit. Brigading usually means getting an external group of people to visit a post/comment solely to vote. It’s effectively crowdsourcing vote manipulation.
I don’t think voting down somebody’s profile counts as vote manipulation because you still only have one voice, but it’s still incredibly petty and I’ve heard Reddit even had a feature such that profile votes don’t affect karma, despite not being banworthy to my knowledge. As a rule of thumb I don’t check post history or even notice usernames because it doesn’t really matter to me, unless a profile is genuinely entertaining to go through.