Specifically applies to places like Lemmy and Reddit. But also other social media like Facebook with thumbs up and down reactions. I'm mostly talking about Lemmy here though.

There's no benefit to having this system on Lemmy. It results in people who disagree with your content leaving a drive-by dookie on your doorstep. If you disagree with someone, you should actually have to leave a comment as to why, instead of just downvoting. If downvotes are removed, things would still be sorted by popularity correctly. The only thing we would lose is the "controversial" sort function, and could just be replaced with a "most comments" or "least upvotes".

People are going to say, just ignore them they don't mean anything. But they do mean something. If you see -13 on a thoughtful post you worked hard on, it makes you feel bad. That's just the human condition.

Yes I know I can turn votes off in settings here, but many people only respond with an upvote to show they read and acknowledge your message, so you're missing out on a whole stream of communication if you disable it.

Anyway, it doesn't keep me up at night, but I think it's lame when people just downvote and leave. It turns comments into this weird popularity contest where you feel unwelcome, especially on a discussion-heavy place like here.

Edit: here's an interesting discussion a while ago that had some ideas: https://lemm.ee/post/30635232