Does it mean that no affiliate products are allowed here at all?
affiliate products. What I was talking about are random articles to which the mailer isn't affiliated. You don't become affiliated with a site just because you share a link from it. Just like you don't become the author of a post just because you copied the text from an online article.
When I said "random articles" it's pretty obvious what is meant. That is used to describe articles that the sender isn't affiliated with whatsoever.
That's how any team operates.
I was being specific about how certain people went up. To me, a team isn't about upvoting a teammate regardless of their content and if they mail bad content. And it's definitely not about concentrating effort to downvote one person or two for calling out plagiarism consistently regardless of the quality of their content.
If someone starts a "downvote drama" and then starts bragging about it publicly,
Do you mean like when a group starts downvoting someone because they called out one of them plagiarising more than once? That kind of downvote drama?
If you start downvoting any person only because he/she belongs to that team is kind of an insane approach.
Exactly, that's why I always downvote mails that are legitimately awful. Downvoting blindly regardless of the content is something only brainless people would do.
Downvoting, in the long run, demotivates people to continue whatsoever.
I understand what you're saying, I really do. But, I also specifically gave an example to contrast the difference between the two extremes. There's a difference between people downvoting maliciously and just as a reaction and people doing based on standards. Go through the comments here and the video above, since you seem to be responding to my comment more than the video, and you will see that I am not the only one with that opinion.
I think even working toward improving will get you points for effort. It takes some really pitiful people to just downvote regardless of the posts. Otherwise, once you express actual willingness to improve, people will see and support that.