Are you seeing users with most of their comments at +/-0, or do you mean you see -1 on all their posts? I’m pretty sure there is a setting to have your own comments not automatically be upvoted by yourself. The users you have seen might just have had that turned on? Resulting in 0 for all their comments unless someone else upvotes it.

There was a similar question a while ago with some nice reads in the answers :)

https://lemmy.ml/post/17575792

How much prep time does the monorail get?

Your description reminds me somewhat of my current favourite podcast. You might enjoy at least some of their episodes I think. :) https://www.weirdstudies.com/

Wow, thanks for sharing all that, was well written and really allowed for a peek into what it was like!

I can tell you that this is called demonym, but I don’t know the answer to your question… The Wikipedia page has a long list of suffixes, but no rules: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonym