You can turn votes off if you dont want to see them. Idk if that helps, but worth trying no? Or you can only show upvotes.

Might be a generational thing but I never like social media much and the ones I engaged in like slashdot then reddit and now here ; well I like to treat it like talking with friends in a basement or bar or whatever. So I guess what im saying is I don’t really look at my posts or comments. I rely and try to have conversations and sometimes they get heated and sometimes they get goofy. Often at the same time. I realize there are bots and shills and trolls so if things get to wierd I will check what the person has wrote in the past and if they don’t seem like a real human being I will block them. I never really look at the up or down votes when I evaluate an account in that way. It took me back that piefed had a threshold. that worked back in the day with slashdot but not in the days of botsNcrap. Sorry don’t really have answers for ya but just a perspective.

You can turn downvotes off in the settings. That’s what I did. If people take issue with what I said then they need to put in some effort and write me a message.

There are instances with downvotes turned off. Blahaj, for example

People who downvote care what you write.

i turned mine off, feels a lot more natural

Lemmy would be better without downvotes tbh.

Do you take breaks from lemmy at all ?

Remember there are very few controls against creating sock puppet accounts for vote manipulation purposes on a lot of instances. If you get slammed with a bunch of downvotes it’s entirely possible that’s just one person.

The fediverse would be a better place if visually there were no votes. I’m fine with it influencing the algorithm (hot, best, controversial, etc) but showing them to users can create a lot of indirect problems.