....trying to determine if your post is positive or negative, up or down....

Yeah. I just take a quick peek at their comment history to see if I should just block them. Works great.

You respond to negativity by downvoting everything negative?

Also, I would recommend blocking users moreso than communities. Once you start looking for it, you realize that like 90% of these posts are made by just a few people/bots.

I wish there was an easy way to block everyone from an instance, like *@shittylemmyinstance.poop or something. Yeah, I do have one instance blocked to avoid the content, but the posters seem fine, but there are a few where blocking users one at a time is like whack-a-mole.

I keep going back and forth on blocking them.

So far I haven’t because I’ve been using their success/failure as a barometer of the situation here. It can be exhausting though

I find that switching to my 'subscribed' feed and sorting by newest weeds out 95% of the doom and outrage. Most single-topic communities are really positive. You very occasionally get a itinerant doomer or naysayer coming out of the woodwork and being rabidly cynical, but in something like a gardening or saxophone community their comment always just looks silly and out of place and is usually easy to ignore.