I stick to the original "Reddiquette" which I wish more people stuck to or even fucking READ for a start.

Downvotes were meant for off-topic and spam nonsense. They were NEVER meant for disagreement. If you disagreed with someone you were encouraged to comment in response. It fostered a much better and interesting community with people of differeing views not afraid to voice their dissent.

You would literally get right and left-wingers having heated but civil debates with each other and neither would be getting heavily downvoted. Can you imagine that happening on Reddit nowadays?

When Diggers and the general populace jumped on Reddit downvotes just turned into a spiteful and underhanded way of saying "Fuck your opinion and I don't feel like justifying it".

This resulted in echo chambers where people were too afraid to voice their true opinions cos they'd get downvoted and at worst banned from the subreddit by over-zealous mods who'd forgotten what downvotes were for.

I have a personal theory that this accelerated the polarisation of politics across the English-speaking world. Maybe if Republicans* didn't get so heavily downvoted they wouldn't have turned to places like The_Donald and 8chan to vent in like-minded echo chambers. They could discuss things without getting villified and have their views challenged in a civil manner.

*NB. Shouldn't matter but to be clear I'm a left wing Brit. I'm just using Donald Trump/Democrats as a will known divisive issue.

I LOVE Lemmy because it has the oldschool Reddit vibe where people will disagree and neither person is downvoting the other. They just have civil discussion. Much better!!

Personally I NEVER downvote unless it's utterly meaningless, pointless or just downright spam. I recently added one more trigger for me to downvote though: Low effort bullshit like "This" or puns that add ntohing to the conversation except to garner upvotes for their 'comedic' value.