lots of people type similar. in fact, many people type in all lowercase such as myself. you don’t know who someone is behind the screen. you don’t know someone’s identity from their typing style.
why do you think No Stupid Questions exists in the first place?? why do you think people ask for help/advice?? if they’re not going around saying rude/absurd crap or anything to get a reaction, it could just be someone with a weird question.
just because someone types similar to someone who was a troll or bad person does not mean that it’s their alt or that they are the same person.
i see this a lot with people assuming that account c is an alt account because account c and account a agree and disagree with account b, or because account b said something rude to account a and account c explained/defended account a. yeah, people can agree on something without being the same person.
if your comment gets -3 votes, it’s unlikely that 3 alts downvoted you, you just said something people disagree with.
Well, you actually can track and observe someone’s writing and pick it up when they switch accounts. There was one guy back on reddit that went through something like 30 before reddit got rid of them entirely.
It isn’t as easy as caps/no caps, but it is doable. The group, bigot watch, used to use it as a way to track bigots, report them, and warn users they it was a new enjoy account bypassing bans. But they went silent post api/app debacle since the people doing the work decided reddit was a dead end for their efforts.
Seriously, it’s a thing. It isn’t a perfect thing, and it takes work to do a proper analysis, so you can’t just scan a single comment and magically make the connection.
Which is tangential to your rant, but I figured you might be interested since it’s patently obvious nobody is doing their due diligence when they make a snap accusation off of a single comment or post. Even three comments from a top level comment with two sock puppets isn’t going to be enough. Well, unless they’re unusually long.
So, back to your point, it is very unlikely someone who gets a few down votes is being sock puppeted down. Not impossible, but unlikely.
And, like you said, if there’s no reason for someone to do it, why make that assumption in the first place? When it’s a regular conversation, jumping to that conclusion is kinda nuts.