You should, yes, have an alt account that is hosted on a different instance. Make that account mod on any communities where you are sole moderator; that way you can mod the muni even if your home instance goes down. Best practice is to link your alts together via links in the profile; see my profile for what I mean.
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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Do you think chronic downvoting is a good reason to ban someone?
No, absolutely not. If downvoting bothers you, you should move to an instance that does not show downvoting.
Moderators that go down the path of trying to discourage/restrict downvoting simply show they are thin-skinned.
Since you believe the downvoting to be chronic, it may be worth your time to ask the person why they are downvoting so much, especially without engagement.
Downvoting doesn't bother me. Feels like you took a hard left with this whole "If you're thin-skinned, then leave" thing.
I like to see downvotes, they show me if people hate something versus not being interested. If someone is downvoting everything, the community isn't for them. Opinions and disagreement are good, trolling is not.
I'm definitely not going out of my way to conduct unpaid market research about it.
it may be worth your time to ask the person why they are downvoting so much, especially without engagement.
Some really just do this to provoke people that care about downvotes. I've seen a few last week.
There's a difference between organic down votes and someone that search up a community to down vote posts from a day or two ago, just going down the new list and clicking buttons. It's abusing the down vote mechanic at that point and has little to do with thickness of skin.
Malicious targeted down voting is in the end toxic and immature behavior that should be curtailed. It's a form of brigading.
It's hard to see this solved by contacting the troll imo, nor should bad behavior be handled with kid gloves either.
It's hard to get traction for a community, especially at the beginning. A handful of users can easily sabotage the whole thing, or even just one person with a few alts. I think it's completely justifiable to ban non-organic down voting.
If I don't like a user or community, I simply block them.