I’ve been so used to judging a post just by its popularity on reddit, but it’s actually so much more useful to have an idea of the downvote ratio. I’m glad we have that here.
It was a scandal when it disappeared from YouTube, but I didn’t realize it was missing from Reddit too for much longer!
Yes, servers can disable downvotes. Beehaw does that, for instance. I’m on lemmy.world which allows both. I prefer both because I think it helps silence bad faith participation with less active moderation, but I respect that some places don’t want it.
unfortunately, “bad faith” is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes I wish to very silently express my disapproval without alerting anyone that there has been disapproval. Everyone finds themselves holding a deeply unpopular/controversial opinion from time to time, bc the universe is a complex place. I see it more as doing my part to “slow the angry mob” when the groupthink starts to get out of control