Something I've seen pointed out about Lemmy and I'm starting to notice a little bit occasionally, is that people love 'answering' questions by not really answering and grandstanding a little bit. Someone asks "is there a gen z community?" and the responses they get are things like "who cares about these generation labels?" and no answers to the question.

Here you ask why there's a large amount of downvotes on a particular instance, and not what people's personal philosophy regarding downvotes is, and yet the top answer is someone that came here especially to tell you that they don't care and no one cares.

And these guys are gonna complain about people going to places like Bluesky instead of joining the fediverse. AskReddit was basically the gateway to Reddit for new users.

To try and guess at an answer, even though I'm new here and haven't even seen downvotes for the last few days. I think that people are trying to keep a certain political atmosphere and not let trolls / right wingers / people who are "just asking questions" take over. So votes go hard in that direction. And also I think there's probably a lot more of the types around here that'll have a 'discussion' while downvoting every response they get from you, more than on Reddit. Just going by the sneering that comes with how some harmless questions are answered.

Votes are meaningless post your shit. Worsen your takes. No one fucken cares

Lemmy is generally very downvote-happy compared to Reddit or other sites. I'd guess its be because of the cinical, pessimistic attitude of a lot of the people here. Unfortunately, its something you'll have to get used to here. On the bright side, this applies to everyone, so you're not being targetted or anything and the same anchor will apply to everyone.

What do you mean

It is an influx of children that happened over the last few months. It is also admin failing to remove the primary half dozen people that represent 90% of all downvoting here as other admins have shared as happening from their panel view. This failure to act is the leading thing holding Lemmy back at the moment. The sad thing is that this server has not been kept up to date which is really bad for Lemmy overall IMO. The lack of action against the amplification of a few bad actors is further evidence of a sick system overall here and is very concerning.

What is the number of down votes to call it hell?

• 10
• 100
• 1000?

Lemmy.world has a lot of users and more users means more downvotes. It also happens to have a lot of news and political communities which attracts a lot of strong opinions.

Personally, I find the only function of downvotes is to discourage contributing and discourse, and that seems antithetical to what this platform is supposed to be about.

I would not know, but it really depends on how people treat the vote. Personally it represents disapproval (not disagreement).