Some accounts are deleting their posts after a few downvotes. It’s devastating on communities like c/asklemmy.
Lemmy doesn’t track an account’s karma like reddit. So, all downvotes will be isolated to your post or comment and won’t affect your account—unless you wrote something truly horrible.
Remember lemmy is a community effort. Deleting a post also removes all comments on it. So you are not only robbing the effort others put in, you are actively removing knowledge from the fediverse. Others won’t be able to find it through search and lemmy will seem lonelier than it already is.
I hope it stays this way. Karma systems inevitably create tribalistic echo chambers, where people downvote others simply because they disagree with a statement but lack any logical counterargument. It is an attempt to silence dissenting opinions, a form of behavior that is both extremely toxic and primitive.
After ~12 years on reddit I still don’t understand the point of karma. Okay, it’s nice to have this counter, but that’s it. I’ve never checked out how much karma someone else has.