One downvote from the OP to troll; one downvote from the troll to OP; ten downvotes from the troll’s arsenal of alts to OP; hundreds of downvotes to the troll from the community.

Except when other people get into the discussion,and you realize that other people are also part of the circlejerk that the initial troll initiated.

Reddit with their quirks and issues have at least demonstrated it’s fine for the most part. Established communities can identify trolls quickly, make them easier to spot for moderators through voting, and enable moderation tools to act and block quickly. Whereas the current Lemmy system feels like burying their head in the sand, and pretending trolls can’t exist because only admins can, through convoluted queries, see the users’ historical vote aggregate.

On this I agree, Lemmy is definetely lacking on moderation tools. Votes should be visible to mods too.

My main account is now on Reddthat, which disables downvotes, and I can tell you I don't use my other accounts to downvote people.

But yes, you could potentially use my case as an example, other people might do it, and use them as I said.

Leaving Lemmy for Threads was never really a concern I heard from anyone, they are completely different services. Like you say, Mastodon is more at risk.

What people on Lemmy were concerned with was rather whether undesirable users on Threads could filter onto Lemmy and negatively affect the user experience here. With the magnitudes larger userbase, Threads users could potentially dominate the Hot feed if they started posting to Lemmy communities.