Unpopular Opinion

It's to encourage posting and comment by having a positive environment, especially on hobby community/instance. Lemmy is still small and post isn't as many, and its full of people who is downvote happy and will downvote topic they don't understand or care. Try build a community around that, i'm sure it won't survive.

If a user prefer to not see downvotes, they can disable it by his favourite client settings, but the rest of the community should not miss this functionality for the pleasure of few users.

Let me flip it around:

If a user prefer to see downvotes, they can go to another instance that support that, the admin paying for the hosting shouldn't need to listen to a few user.

It's a setting, it's a tool, let people building the community/instance adjust it how they want instead of dictating how they choose, isn't that your point?

Well i think caring about upvotes and downvotes at all is the sign of someone going through an exceptionally fucking lame part of their lives. Just stop giving a shit about something so... so... extravagantly useless and bam! Life improved.

Upvotes and downvotes are simply engagement markers that prove you made an impact on that many people. If you need to tell someone you don't like them, ya can't downvote them, tell em! Tell em how wrong they are! Get that bag baby! Now get up, get out there and get ta arguin with your words

What is needed is better controls over who can downvote. Communities should get better controls for moderation - up to and including control over whose votes get counted. Simple controls like "only subscribers" or "accounts older than 1 week" or "accounts that have commented on the post/replied to this comment" all the way through to "only users on this list".

But pushing the control into the individual user's hands will simply create echo chambers worse than the existing ones. Let's not turn Lemmy into Facebook.

This might be a real unpopular opinion but I think the down vote is a broken feature. We do need some kind of vote to help the best stuff rise to the top, thus the up vote. Down vote basically says "I disagree with your opinion but I don't have a strong enough rebuttal to engage in the discussion to explain why". A basic agreement doesn't usually add a lot to the conversation unless the comment itself comes with additional context, a disagreement requires some level of dialog as to explain why. It encourages this bubble hivemind instead of open discussion. Really makes me miss how popular forums were in the mid 2000s.

It doesn't really stop spam, we have stronger mechanics for that like reporting, moderation and spambot tools. Plus posts without any engagement usually just fall off pretty quickly without reaching a wider audience.

Then you have your trolls who collect down votes. Having a vote score of 1 is way less compelling for a troll than -15.

Edit

4 down votes without discussion, we've just proved the point.