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Should we downvote spam, in addition to flagging?
On a certain other Q&A site, users are told to flag spam, but not to downvote it. On that site, downvoting moves a question further down the front page, meaning less people will see it - and hence, less people will flag it.
Things work differently here on Codidact, and I think their logic does not apply here.
Obviously we should flag spam posts on Codidact. But should we also downvote them?
- On the one hand, a downvote is still a signal to the spammer that somebody interacted with their post.
- On the other hand, it is a signal to others that the post is poor quality.
I could not find an answer to this (yet) on Codidact Meta. Only that it is okay to flag a post that already has spam flags.
2 answers
Personally, I downvote bad posts. "Bad" could be because a post is poorly written, poorly formatted, misleading, contains wrong information, is off topic, is link-only, spam, or otherwise a net negative to the site.
So yes, I recommend to downvote spam. Of course in the case of spam, it should also be flagged as such.
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I have been downvoting spam, like Olin describes in his post.
Upon reflection, I might refrain in the future, lest voting give the spammer an indicator of the number of eyeballs that encountered their post before it was relegated to the hot place.
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