Might be a generational thing but I never like social media much and the ones I engaged in like slashdot then reddit and now here ; well I like to treat it like talking with friends in a basement or bar or whatever. So I guess what im saying is I don’t really look at my posts or comments. I rely and try to have conversations and sometimes they get heated and sometimes they get goofy. Often at the same time. I realize there are bots and shills and trolls so if things get to wierd I will check what the person has wrote in the past and if they don’t seem like a real human being I will block them. I never really look at the up or down votes when I evaluate an account in that way. It took me back that piefed had a threshold. that worked back in the day with slashdot but not in the days of botsNcrap. Sorry don’t really have answers for ya but just a perspective.

You can turn votes off if you dont want to see them. Idk if that helps, but worth trying no? Or you can only show upvotes.

You can turn downvotes off in the settings. That’s what I did. If people take issue with what I said then they need to put in some effort and write me a message.

There are instances with downvotes turned off. Blahaj, for example

People who downvote care what you write.

i turned mine off, feels a lot more natural

Lemmy would be better without downvotes tbh.

Remember there are very few controls against creating sock puppet accounts for vote manipulation purposes on a lot of instances. If you get slammed with a bunch of downvotes it’s entirely possible that’s just one person.

The fediverse would be a better place if visually there were no votes. I’m fine with it influencing the algorithm (hot, best, controversial, etc) but showing them to users can create a lot of indirect problems.