I’ve had many positive interactions with other users on Lemmy and piefed—across various communities.

I really appreciate the Fediverse, but unfortunately I’m also familiar with the phenomenon where people go along with the majority and downvote comments or posts just because the opinion expressed doesn’t match their own.

I think the developers of reddit clones like Lemmy should change the system so that downvotes are only available to users who have already contributed helpful posts or comments.

The requirements for this should be left to the community.

In my opinion, this would significantly reduce the burdensome negativity of apps of this kind, and the discussions would be better. This is all the more true in the Fediverse, since it is much easier here to create multiple accounts to influence the discourse.

It would likely also prevent the inevitable misunderstanding that downvotes on reddit clones like Lemmy are not intended to express disapproval, but rather to flag a post or comment that are unhelpful, nonsensical, offensive, deceptive, or malicious—in short, not conducive to the discussion.