yeah, I don’t understand when people get hot against downvoting. Sure, it sucks if people don’t like what you post, but people need to be able to voice both agreement and disagreement. I mean, in real life, if you’re in a situation where you’re not allowed to disagree, merely demur or agree, it’s usually considered toxic. It’s not healthy, at any rate. Making silence the only “no” allowed doesn’t work because silence is usually taken as a softer form of agreement. And while people are usually allowed to comment negatively, this isn’t great because people will usually want to avoid that unless they’re in the mood for a fight. Not everything is worth an argument, and downvoting allows people to give their opinion without having to dwell on the post or comment in question. Allowing for some ‘unfair’ downvotes works because the majority will be for more rational reasons, like for posts that are cruel, wasting space, deliberate misinformation, and so on.

The other thing too is that people seem to forget we’re not on Reddit, where the voting mechanism was used against people, whereas here only your own voting patterns are reflected upon you. I mean that we don’t have the karma system which did make the voting a problem. Downvoting in the fediverse isn’t going to affect the other person’s ability to post again elsewhere. I can understand people getting very hot about downvotes if they had bad experiences on Reddit and assume the system works identically here (again, it doesn’t! Although feddit.online (or PieFed?) will remove your ability to downvote if your ratio hits 0, and you can upvote some stuff and get your downvotes back :V ). I do wish documentation was clearer/easier to find. Gets a little confusing how each instance is a wee bit different, plus we say Lemmy, but there’s also PieFed, and then there’s also the rest of the Fediverse…