Is it a PTB move (!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com) to ban a user if their only activity in a community is downvoting posts?
The behaviour baffles me a bit. If they dislike the majority of the posts in a community, why are they subscribed? Or if they are browsing by /all, why have they not blocked the community? Are they under the mistaken impression that Lemmy has an algorithm which uses downvotes as an indicator for “show me less of this”?
Has anyone else encountered a “serial downvoter” in any of their communities?
Ban them.
Lemmy is so young (and feeble) that users like those are an actual threat to your community and the larger network by driving away those who actually contribute to the community. In 2019, TrueBirch from Reddit analysed the data and concluded that only 1.9% of users actually comment or post while 98.1% just lurks. When your community is has a thousand or so users, it’s entirely reasonable to protect those ~20 users who are creating content for the rest. In fact, the majority of the rest likely don’t upvote things either.
I’d argue that lemmy is so young, and small, that communication first is a viable, and better, way to start.