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So where’s the line defining malicious downvotes?

Someone who downvotes 60% of a community’s posts? 75%? 90%.

Well to quote John oliver, "it's somewhere, you draw it somewhere". Though to be more specific. If someone downvotes a handful of posts in a community or if many different and people downvote one post that isn't considered malicous. If one person downvotes every post in the community instead of blocking the community that would be considered malicious downvoting and indeed on many instances a violation of voting etiquette or even a violation of the rules, considering it vote manipulation or inorganic voting.

Other things to consider would be double voting, or use of other accounts to vote on content, such behavior is almost universally frowned upon on all Lemmy instances and is the fastest way to get banned from communities and even from sites as a whole.

The final factor is the content or type of the post. Posts being downvoted for being low quality or disliked generally isn't considered malicious, posts being downvoted because you dislike the person or community is considered malicious and while we can't be sure of your intent seeing that you downvoted every post in a community or every post by a user all at once gives a good idea of those intentions.

Another factor is community engagement. People who don't engage with the community at all and downvote every post do not contribute. If a community has a lot of bad low quality content giving feedback on that content is invaluable. Downvoting is lazy or and basically non-existent feedback. And for communities which have evil or severely objectionable content, you should be reporting it to admins, not downvoting, downvoting hate speech is the equivalent to seeing someone assaulting or robbing someone else and yelling "boo 👎" and/or "you suck" instead of getting help. You may not be explicitly punished for either but it is considered unproductive and unfortunately is what most people on Lemmy do given the amount of hate speech on many instances.

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Youre setting yourself up as vote arbiter, telling users they can only vote the way you want. That’s just as problematic, maybe more so.

It should be noted that actioning people for votes should only be done in extreme situations, such as the person downvoting everyone of that community's posts without any interaction there whatsoever, or the person downvoting every one of a user's posts/comments because they don't like the person.

Another thing is that this idea is operating under the typical notion on Lemmy that users and moderators are already abusing their power, or just will abuse it. Which ultimately is not the case. There are definitely some users and moderators who do, the majority are not currently doing it though. I understand what you are worried about and that you think regular voters like you will get caught up in it or that your voting patterns will be seen as malicious, and maybe they are for all I know, I only saw small amounts of it, from what I did see though I don't think you have as much to worry about as you think you do. Having bad takes isn't going to get you banned, and even excessive downvoting is unlikely to give you a permanent ban unless you have a long history of it and overly confrontational behavior.

Yea, there are people who consistently downvote stuff, but isn’t that how votes work? Like another commenter, I too downvote a lot of AI garbage, because it’s garbage. Am I a malicious downvoter, no longer permitted my opinion?

If you downvote every post in a community without participating it usually says two things, the first is that you don't like the content or community. The second is that you are trying to suppress or undermine the community.

In the first case it would be encouraged to block/hide/mute the community. This ensures that you will stop seeing it and content posted to it in your feed. Which is what benefits most people in this situation. The second option would absolutely be seen as malicious actions both by community moderators and admins alike, as you don't simply dislike the community you are trying to suppress or undermine it by attempting to manipulate its position in feed, not simply voting on the content but attempting to shove the community itself down. This you could absolutely expect a ban for, both from their mods but even from instance admins front the entire site, as instance admins agree that brigading and vote manipulation are unacceptable, and that it would be preferable to do something about it. You downvoting specific content you see for being low quality doesn't count as that. People downvoting whole communities for being AI-gen communities does, and downvoting an entire user's post history because they created a decentralized community driven AI generation platform. You voting organically on feed items as you see them doesn't count as abuse, and the idea that actioning abuse would trickle down to you is a slippery slope argument.

However if you do feel like you engage in behavior that seems to violate those principles like downvoting against a person's profile, downvoing an entire community, or even voting with multiple accounts to make things go in your favor or against the person's favor. I would say that you should work on changing your patterns to avoid such behavior. Downvoting is a matter of public expression, and while it is binary unlike comments it can still be misued the all the same. A person who trolls in comments or lashes out at people is labeled a troll and gets banned, a person who does it with downvotes may get away with it easier but they are still a troll, and they are liable to get banne like most trolls do. However people who are lost and realize their behavior was unproductive or unacceptable can indeed change and stop being trolls and if their actions weren't too harsh they may be welcomed back.

The last few weeks I’ve consistently downvoted any political posts in communities where they clearly don’t belong (my opinion). Am I a malicious downvoter for that?

You are using downvotes as intended from what you have said, you are not committing the abuse I or @[email protected] have described, at least I do not think you have. I would encourage you report content which does not belong as that can help remove out of place content and clean up communities but failure to do that is not abusive voting, brigading, or vote manipulation. So far from what you've said and the small amount I've seen you are not someone who should be worried about mods and admins taking action against abusive voting.

I understand your concern, I too was like you in the past and concerned when hearing admins discuss abusive voters, brigading, and vote manipulation. I was just a lurker who barely commented and did more voting than visible interaction. I didn't think what they were saying was real, that it was over-exaggerated, or even on occasion that the admins want to screw me over. But in time as I posted more, commented more, and eventually started my own communities or was invited to moderate communities for others the negative effects of vote manipulation became much more apparent, and I learned to realize that it was never people like me who were targeted, but truly malicious people, who have little to no redeemability. People who would downvote almost automatically without care or opinion, people who downvote not because things are low quality, or even that they dislike them, but because they want to make the community fail, they want to punish the person behind the post. Some of these people aren't even real, they are robots set up by people for suppression purposes. I was never a target of these moderation policies, and neither are you right now.

I realize that I wrote a lot, get used to it. I have a lot of things to say even when someone thinks they're posting a worthless gotcha argument. I write comment content knowing that it won't only be seen by the person I'm replying to but by others as well, so even if you choose not to read it, it'll still be beneficial for the others who see the thread. If you want to get something out of it I would suggest reading it but if you don't feel like it it's not like I'm going to try and force you.