I used to downvote fairly often on Reddit as a sign to disagree or to push down really disgusting bigoted comments. And to be honest, it became a habit to just downvote without replying. However, now that I’m on lemmy and not Reddit I’ve been actively trying to not instantly downvote things and instead move on or take the time to reply. Has anyone else been trying to do this?
I don’t think downvoting is a good thing. The argument is always “send a message to the user without engaging” but what you are doing is discouraging those users from posting and commenting at all.
I feel like upvoting content you agree with is a better method than downvoting content you don’t agree with.