We had a random post in an anarchist community on our Polish speaking instance. Some 45 English speaking accounts came out of nowhere to downvote it, with a single one engaging in discussion. None of them were ever active on the instance, nor particularly in this community. Seems they just followed every crosspost.
Mods could not really do anything about it, so the accounts were banned from the entire instance by admins, as this was considered hostile behaviour against our community.
Which rises the question; should people be able to vote, end specially downvote, in communities they are not a part of? Maybe this could be at least a setting?
Another interesting concept that came from the discussion over that was “constructive downvote” - requirement of commenting why one downvotes a post.
Speaking only to this…
Hexbear chose to remove downvotes, and the “dunking” comments came to replace them. Getting ratioed is a thing, which purportedly started on Twitter.
The consensus on Lemmygrad came to be that (and I’m paraphrasing because I’m not sure of the original phrasing) “dissent without elaboration” is valid. We don’t always have the time or energy to articulate our dissent (and sometimes gish gallop doesn’t deserve it).
You could upvote another dissenting opinion instead of articulating your own.
IMO, if you don’t have the time or energy to articulate dissent, then perhaps don’t vote, since that vote is probably not constructive anyway. I’m in favor of requiring some kind of additional action for a downvote. The intuition is that downvoting should require more effort than upvoting, since downvotes tend to have larger repercussions than upvotes.
The alternative here is some mechanism to separate “high value” from “low value” votes. I’m interested in something like a “web of trust,” where you weight votes by how much you value the user’s opinion. That way a brigade by people you don’ trust wouldn’t impact you at all, and a single vote by someone you trust a lot could show an unpopular but useful post when it would otherwise be hidden.