I understand getting upset if you made a good faith argument and it gets a ton of downvotes. I still think it's valid, but I understand why others would disagree.

But people here (and on Reddit) are way too sensitive to them. I have seen too many comments here with "Edit: why am I getting downvoted? Explain yourselves" when it's got 10 upvotes and 2 downvotes.

Some trolls downvote everything. Some people have bots that downvote everything. Some people have bad reading comprehension and will downvote things they would agree with. Once you assume a baseline level of negativity you'll stop taking things personally and start enjoying interactions more.

Downvotes bother me because they impact the visibility of my content, especially on small communities

Downvoting is intolerance made cheap. It's a button to say: "You're wrong, I don't care what you have to say, LA LA LA LA SHUT UP". If you did the equivalent of downvoting in an in-person discussion, you would be an asshole.

But what really annoys me personally (someone else mentions it) is that downvoting reduces the visibility of the downvoted opinion. It's literally soft censorship.

I regularly leave discussions after receiving cheap downvotes in return for my carefully considered contribution. It's a statistical certainty that I'm not the only one.

Downvoters should consider the opportunity cost of their actions for the quality of the discussion they are taking part in.

If you're bothered by social media votes, you need to go outside more.

Social media isn't real. It's a poor simulacrum of human interaction. Find real human beings to interact with and whatever they think of you, tell you, or how they treat you in your face matters.

But whatever people become and how they behave once they hide behind a screen and cast simplistic one-bit click-clicks to express complex human feelings and opinions doesn't.

I disagree but my instance has downvotes disabled so i can't downvote you like you've requested :p

One instance explained to me that they disabled downvoting because of massive brigading issues due to what they are and what they stand for. I had assumed that everyone over there was just fragile… but apparently it’s a real issue for them folk and that had never occurred to me before.

Are you sure it's not that people who aren't bothered by downvotes disagree with you on how to use social media.

People use these their own way. And good on them, screw what makes some shareholders more money

And because of that, downvotes remain off for me.

I think upvoting and downvoting should remain a feature for sorting posts, but the scores shouldn’t be visible to anyone. Making scores public encourages people to say what’s popular and discourages them from expressing unpopular opinions, even if they believe them to be true. Humans are social creatures, and we care too much about what others think. If you agree or disagree with someone and want them to know, you should tell them directly rather than anonymously ranking them.

Or perhaps just let people disabled downvotes if they don’t like them :). I’m not hurting you, in fact, I can only upvote.

I don’t like the fact niche hobbyist communities on lemmy often have half their posts downvoted because people saw it on c/all and downvoted for no reason.

It's human nature for people to feel upset by their message being undermined.....but they should be able to get over it.

The bigger problem I have is that the downvoters don't know how to USE downvotes. Instead of downvoting inaccurate content or engaging in any reasoning, people just downvote what they personally don't like and disagree with. Which is bullshit.

I admit to posting shitty comments sometimes, just because I feel some adversity is nice. Lemmy seems pretty uniform, politically. That just annoys me. So I get a fair share of downvotes. In general, I don't take online discussions in comment sections too seriously, though. I mean, you can't expect people there to actually research and listen to arguments. It mostly seems like emotional venting/searching for confirmation of your bias to me.

PieFed also just shows one number.

I am a 5-star man