I’m very curious about the reasoning different people use when deciding to downvote a post or comment. Often, when something gets “heavily” downvoted, the OP will ask some variation of “why the downvotes?”. This is sometimes answered with sincere criticism, but sometimes is received even more poorly than the original offending post.
Do you downvote people who ask “why the downvotes?”? What informs the decision?
I have anxiety, so I change settings (in Thunder) so they’re hidden.
I don’t think I would have had the self-awareness to turn them off myself, but since I have started using blahaj.zone (which disables downvotes by default) I have been very pleasantly surprised at what a difference it makes. It makes social media a lot less stressful and more fun to use, with AFAICT no significant downsides. It’s very nice.