This is an explication of DoubleAA's pointDoubleAA's point that
the posts that do come in on Shabbat tend to be mostly just the lower quality or spam posts
Suppose that we simplify our non-deleted content collection into three groups:
high-value, which gets, on average, many up-votes and very few downvotes
medium-value, which gets, on average, some up votes and few downvotes
low-value, which gets, on average, few upvotes and some downvotes
Most of the users who produce most of the high-value posts are experts on Judaism, most of whom are dormant on the Sabbath. Therefore, relatively very few high-value posts are produced on the Sabbath. In addition, most of the content produced by such experts is at least medium-value.
Roughly conversely, the users who are not dormant on the Sabbath are mostly not experts on Judaism, so most of the content they produce is medium- or low-value.
As a result, on the Sabbath, very little high-value content is contributed, and low-value content is a greater proportion of the whole than it is during the week. This causes the average votes per post to be significantly less favorable.
More speculatively, I'd suggest that perhaps posts that would get closed quickly during the week, thanks to the much-higher activity levels, stay open for longer when posted on the Sabbath, and that as a result, they collect more down-votes from people who see them sitting around, open. It should be possible to test this hypothesis by querying, if you're interested.
By the way, congratulations on an excellent meta post. I appreciate the way you're approaching a new community by taking a good, objective, data-driven approach at what's going on, being sensitive to local conventions, and asking questions.
