I am a Piefed user. My default settings auto-hide things downvoted by a certain threshold. I have notice that this by default hides a lot of bigotry or cruelty from me, so I don’t bother changing the setting that collapses replies downvoted past a certain threshold. I think a lot of other are the same, or they just never change it because a lot of people do not mess with default settings.
I know that some people downvote as a simple dislike button. Alright, irrelevant, I don’t care. But I also know that some do it because you broke the norms of the community or the rules or did something mean and cruel. There are enough trolls and dislike-downvoters out there that the most uncontroversial and on-topic post will still get downvotes. 10 downvotes to 200 upvotes is nothing to worry about. But 20 downvotes to 20 upvotes? Hmm, did I just post an unpopular thing and so I can ignore the downvotes, or did I make a big faux pas and was 1) unintentionally but unfortunately bigoted 2) cruel to another user 3) breaking a community norm/rule I failed to notice 4) perceived as spamming/self-promoing/LLM output (I write my em dashes with my own two hands on my keyboard) 5) anything else that people give deserved downvotes for because you’re mucking up the discussion? Time to do some self-examination. There is noise in downvotes, but there’s some meaningful signal too.
And the people who seem too sensitive about downvotes might be picking up on the signal, going “what did I do? I didn’t do anything wrong, why are you mad at me?” and getting upset over that. I can certainly understand where they might be coming from if they poured their heart out and got a bunch of unexpected downvotes. Or if they are having a really rough day or something. “Is my picture of a pear really that offensive that people would downvote it? Or did I just get my post collapsed and hidden from everyone in !pears or !photography because enough people on All didn’t like it, figured that downvote = dislike, and hit the downvote button? Man, (assuming !pears and !photography are moderately active) having the reasonable expectation that people would see and interact with my post, but having that frustrated because it is auto-hidden as if it were spam sure is frustrating.” And if this is one of your first posts, at least on Piefed, I think if you get enough downvotes you might get marked with two exclamation points by your username for lots of downvotes. Kind of a caution sign, controversial content or spam or cruel or something. Nobody wants to be slapped with the “take care around this person” sign for doing nothing wrong but posting something the hivemind dislikes but that didn’t actually do anything harmful beyond make someone look at a picture they thought was ugly.
I do not care about the fake internet points, but I do care about the consequences voting has on whether your post will get seen or not, and about the humans trying, in some small way, to judge my post through those votes in case I have actually done something objectionable.
Used to lurk in communities online that mocked others(’ behavior). Sometimes, the “wow what a worthless human being, the world would be better off if they weren’t here” comments also add “couldn’t be bothered to [do good thing X], what a [bad trait Y]” or “what kind of monster does [bad thing X], how [bad trait Y] of them.” Socially inept teenage me found this very instructive on what was acceptable and what was not, especially since I was inadvertently provided the why. (I avoid these types of communities now as a hopefully more-well-adjusted adult.) People can absolutely use their words to explain why something is shameful… at least when they are pretty sure everyone else is on their side, and the person being shamed won’t be able to retaliate (I am sure whoever is filmed for r/noahgettheboat isn’t aware they were posted on Reddit) or will be downvoted a lot if they try to defend themselves, whether justifiably or not (people judged assholes on r/AmITheAsshole).