I propose that we should have some sort of bar to allow downvoting.
We seem to have a certain user who has been doing literally nothing but downvoting.
While this is little more than an annoyance. There's nothing stopping a herd of goats from showing up and manipulating the front page of our quaint little corner of the internet.
It's not the loss of imaginary points that I care about, it's the lack of visibility for the posts themselves.
To be fair. Voat showed me exactly what happens when a large group of extremists show up in a small community.
I watched voat go from something very similar to what we have here to the massive shit storm it currently is. All it took was FPH and coontown to completely change the focus and demographic of the community.
Yeah, a massive influx of ideologically charged people will have an impact on a community. The best bet is to keep the inflow slow enough to manage. However we have no control over newcomers, except to hide and hope we aren't discovered.
Part of the problem was concessions which undermined each community's ability to retain focus and protect from malicious actors. The definition of free speech was slowly expanded so that any moderation was in violation. The newcomers worked to banbait mods and push their ideology of 4chan style moderation.
(Politics sidenote: the actual refugee numbers that are causing the outrage are minuscule compared to the population. A few hundred thousand per year into a country of a few hundred million.
From the State department: "Since 1975, Americans have welcomed over 3 million refugees from all over the world"
3 million over 40 years.)
I think we went down this road before. And Voat demonstrated that restrictions cause more wailing and gnashing of teeth than they prevent brigading, downvoting and other manipulation.
That was the argument on Voat about Reddit. And in current politics about immigration. Always with the assertion that landed assimilated immigrants are somehow different than the incoming ones, which are the devil and will corrupt our society.
I would prefer a move in the other direction. To give the user total control over their feed (subs as pure tags, subscribe to editor or mod, block posts by user, domain, sub). I don't know how to give each user customization over post scoring, however.