Oh yes for sure - beauty is most definitely in the eye of the beholder. Some people might prefer to spin up an instance and remove all votes from it, preferring to browse solely by community and/or All (related: some might disable only downvotes but retain upvotes). Other people might prefer to disable even comments, preferring to use the Threadiverse as an RSS reader, link aggregator, without any of the pesky social interaction - that's not what I personally want but if someone wants that... then fine, go for it?

"Quieter" there was a modifier for the previous word "affect" - i.e., how the downstream effects would impact the person being replied to there, not a value judgement but an explanation of noticeable changes.

I'm perfectly fine with an instance admin tuning their personal instance however they choose - e.g. blocking the major posters in memes and news communities, if they want a lower internet bill and to sort through content how they wish.

That said, this change in the PieFed software was VERY unexpected, not announced almost at all, not transparent at all, and rolled out by default to impact all upgrades to the v1.7 codebase. PieFed.social is NOT someone's personal instance - it is the very flagship instance of the entire PieFed subset of the Threadiverse. So some level of prior expectations are to be expected to come into play in regards to what settings it will choose to use - especially if those are subject to change with little to no notice, and with such major impacts upon the people who have chosen to use it?

PugJesus has donated an IMMENSE amount of time to enhance the Threadiverse, and now not only him but many of us are losing hope in not only PieFed but in this entire Threadiverse experiment overall.

This is quite impactful!