How about Lemmy having Junk and not-Junk buttons, like email clients have, which can be pressed to indicate spam posts. With a threshold of say five clicks by users on the Junk button it would automatically remove a post (or maybe “frozen” : still visible but greyed out and web links in post and comment made unusable, which might discourage spammers to spam on Lemmy instances). To avoid abuse (Like users creating more than one account to have posts deleted of users they have a personal problem with) this privilege would be given for example to long standing Lemmy users with a certain amount of comments and posts. By doing this the dependency on community mods and admins will be decreased and the empowerment of regular users increased while posted spam has a short life time.
What do you think ?
I agree with your sentiment, but I think it is important to acknowledge that this isn’t so much a “super-downvote” but a vote in another dimension. Downvotes don’t differentiate between “non-interesting” and “malicious”.
That being said I think downvote ratio + poster history is probably enough to infer the difference between boring and spam so I don’t think the added complexity of a “Junk” button is worth it.
It works in theory but generally people don’t use these features as intended. Even downvotes which usually should mean “this is irrelevant to the discussion” most of the time are used as “I don’t agree with this”.