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.
Yep, but the point is I don't have to see it. I could have 20k downvotes, but I'll never know. Out of sight, out of mind. I personally believe it poisons the discourse, but I know some people like it.
You also don't see the upvote count either, unless you have it enabled. My instance for some reason doesn't allow me to downvote anyone, and I can't see upvotes.
To me it just sounds like you want to feel good about the things you're able to make others agree on, and simply don't want to face the fact that sometimes you may say awful stuff.
The above is not directed at you but anyone who would say yes upvotes, no downvotes.
You send the downvote to your instance. Your instance takes note of it. It then forwards the "state change" to our instance. Our instance drops the request as we do not have downvotes enabled, and that's it. :)
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.