Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
Disapproval has its place in deterring bad behavior. It’s not toxic to disagree with a person. If the only two choices are approval and indifference it promotes toxic behavior as there is nothing to suppress the toxic behavior.
Edit: I understand what you are getting at though and one thing I didn’t like is people using the downvote button as a disagree button. I only ever use it to downvote off-topic, spam, or toxic posts/comments; but I’ve been on Reddit and gotten massively downvoted because I’ve expressed an opinion counter to general consensus (hive mind)
Yeah we’re kinda on the same page there, its just intent and what it evolves into later down the road tend to drift apart over time. A down buttom isn’t inherantly bad, but it seems inevitably mossed used by a large portion of users. And right now lemmy is taking in a mass influx of refugees from a place that -already- had large numbers of users doing so.
I didn’t try lemmy till like a week before all reddits recent drama. I wish I had found this ages ago. I actually found this via github instead of reddit! But once thay drama happened I knew a lot of folks would be looking for a replacement.
Hopefully I’m not comimg off as concern trolling. Things have worked as is for lemmy for some time. Best case scenario is the former reddit users get used to lemmy’s kinder culture and no systems adapt from it.
I disagree on it meaning there is nothing to stop toxic behavior though. If somethings truly toxic it has -always- taken action beyond a simple downvote to excise.