Far too often, lately, I see lots of people worried about the number of downvotes, or making preliminary justifications and requests to not downvote particular posts.
Me? I don’t have to think about any of that. The content of the posts and comments determines their quality, not some artificial number that only represents whether people dis/like something.
Edit: Wow, a lot of people from other instances seem really offended that I don’t like downvoting and seem a bit confused that I’d be thanking my admins for something I appreciate.
If you like downvoting, you don’t have to move here. Enjoy your instance’s features. Welcome to the Fediverse.
Yonatan Zunger, the lead engineer on Google+, once wrote a post about the research Google did to decide that downvotes don’t foster healthy discussions. Sadly his post has been lost to time, but I found it pretty convincing. It’s also refreshing not to feel the need to find and downvote every comment in a heated thread that’s, racist, fascist, transphobic, etc.
Reporting is a much better method for moderation on Lemmy anyway. The mods here seem to actually care a lot more than they do in more centralized spaces.