Surely by the same logic upvoting without providing a reason for it should also be decentivised - why should negative feedback require taking the time to explain “why”, whilst positive feedback would not - logically either they both require a “why” or none does.

An uneven posture when it comes to receiving feedback only makes sense if one is emotionally impacted by “somebody disagreed with me and didn’t told me why” and having such a socially fragile ego is really the problem of that person, not of everybody else.

More generally and as I pointed out in a long post which I made in the other Karma thread (which I will not repeat here), the removing (or punishing) downvotes is just a strategy to incentivise more content posting, no matter how mediocre, which in turn leads to a a lower signal to noise ratio (i.e. more mindles fluff less content) which is bad for everybody - no-work negative criticism (i.e. downvotes without the need to spend time making explanatory posts) are quite an effective way of providing feedback on the shoddiness of something without the artificial barrier against criticism which is to require spending time on an explanation - I mean, if 1 or 2 downvotes get to you, then you definitelly have emotional issues you need to explore with an expert in such things as a handful of anonymous “I don’t like that” can be easilly dismissed as “there are a handful of people who disagree with what I wrote (so what?!)”, whilst an unexpected 10 or 20+ downvotes are often a pretty good hint to think again about what your published.

It seems to me that it’s incredibly selfish and self-centred to demand that everybody else takes the time to write an explanation when you write something they disagree with: other people’s time is their own and they do not exist merelly to serve your ego just as you don’t exist merelly to serve theirs.

Mind you, I do think it would be fair for there to be some way for people to disable viewing of downvotes on their account, as people with such “sensitivity” to negative feedback deserve to be able to participate in social media just like everybody else and since Lemmy keeps track of both negative and positive votes getting the interface to just show the positive stuff should be reasonably easy and it would protect the ego of those who need such protection.

I do like that. Perhaps an exponential factor where if you downvote 10 comments you lose 1 karma, downvote 20 you lose 10 karma, etc.

I think the idea of sacrificing your own “good boi points” to downvote a post bring a new layer of complexity. For sure, the hive-mind effect would be attenuated if users had to sacrifice their own “points”, and, probably, the downvoting as a whole would be less used. What do you guys think about how the use of the downvote would change?