True… I suppose. Fortunately there are instances that have downvotes disabled. In the settings of your account you can also hide downvotes.

I prefer Slashdot style mod points to upvotes/downvotes as there is an opportunity cost to voting. I find it fosters more interesting and less echo-chambery discussions.

I got no clue what “Slashdot” is. Wikipedia says:

Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as /.) is a social news website that originally billed itself as “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters”. It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments.

It doesn’t really explain how the voting system works there. Mind to explain it?

No that’s a horrible idea. It should be up to the Admins and Mods to decide what speech is allowed in their instances and communities. Making downvotes have a negative effect would only encourage bad actors to create accounts solely to downvote people, which will in turn create a black market of buying downvotes, to censor post you don’t like, and upvotes, to up censor votes you like.

This agricultural industry around farming accounts to downvote would overwhelm the Admins with account applications. People could also create instances for se sole purpose of making downvoting bot accounts. You might say those instances could be blocked. True, they would. But this could go from bad to worse considering that this could open the door to instance Admins themselves doing downvote based censorship, since they can create has many accounts as they want.

Also, I fell like this is relevant:

The whole point of the Fediverse is since we all want different things from our social media and people will always disagree on something, it is better to have different independent instances, which federate and defederate to create a nice environment for all. People who disagree on something (like whether nsfw content or curse words should be allowed) so much to the point of ruining their experience, they can just go to instances where that content is blocked, instead of spending an eternity arguing over it. This allows for diversity of thought and opinion over the whole system.

I had no idea u/UniversalMonk@lemm.ee even existed lol. Congratulations u/SelfProgrammed@lemmy.today, you just advertised this guy’s account to who knows how many people.