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.
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.)
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.