Why does it seem that on larger platforms there are bots that downvote comments?
You can tell it’s bots because all the downvotes happen at the same time. I can guess for astroturfing purposes one would want to upvote their targeted comments and downvote all others but on lemmy?
You look at it as a social media platform. The people who run bot accounts, have specific goals they want to achieve such as swaying public opinion on a specific topic. They could have been paid by a corporation to do damage control on a negative event that happened.
When they downvote you and upvote their other bots, their content gets higher visibility.
And even the votes themselves can help sway public opinion to a small degree.
An otherwise popular opinion may appear less popular if it has a few bot-made downvotes attached to it.