Does the reddit style format inherently make for a toxic environment? Or is it a culture of toxicity from the influx of reditors? For lack of a beter example, on stackoverflow, when someone down votes you, it comes with a comment saying how to improve. On mastodon, people can’t downvote you. These platforms are a joy to use, lemmy is depressing if you post. Its depressing because every post or comment, no mater the quality comes with downvotes, and usually no criticism to accompany it, you are left not knowing if youve made a mistake, or if its just trolls, bots, or idiots. At the end you feel insulted not improved. What do you think?
The only place on here that I’ve noticed downvotes is on comments that have been obviously social media shills (reddit or meta) or right wing type comments that are not the type of thing a community should support in my opinion. I’m not saying you’re doing either of those things and if you’re being downvoted in another context I don’t know why.
That said, downvotes shouldn’t really get you down. If you’ve said something awful then you deserve them and should reassess your outlook if you were unaware that your views or attitude were unpleasant. If you’re getting downvoted on a tech related thing then I don’t know what that’s all about but I would try not to worry about it too much because it doesn’t really affect your life, it’s just a fake internet down arrow.
Thank you, interestingly the thing that prompted me to ask was a tech joke, all (4) down-votes, I removed a jab at Apple and added a picture and the the responses was positive. The lesson must be one of these: That we have mostly strong apple fans here; jokes need a picture even if it does not add anything; or people look at the vote total to decide their mindset while reading and the first vote was down by bad luck. Or some combination of these.
Oooooh yeah people love their apple and I think you have your answer!