Ironically, I’ve been downvoted for saying this in response to somebody sympathizing with my previous downvoted comment that was expanding in support of somebody’s highly upvoted comment with some background.

I think the general sentiment on Lemmy is that any comment reply must surely be in disagreement and receives an automatic downvote. Mostly I visit the comments for discourse and upvote interesting threads of conversation.

In my opinion, really there should be no downvote button.

I rarely downvote. If I disagree with someone that means no up vote most times. Downvote should be limited to spam, harmful or completely irrelevant.

I’ve been downvoted to oblivion before just because I don’t agree with the hive mind. That to me is scary and people should be concerned that’s even a thing.

I prefer to have downvotes because they give you a better picture than, say, upvotes only.

Popular or important comments in an upvote-only system will still float to the top. And now we don’t know how many people disagreed (HA!) with them.

Yup. The amount of times I saw a comment that was downvoted to oblivion for containing a shred of nuance and that required the most minute sliver of time’s worth of critical thinking getting downvoted unjustly boggles the brain. Downvotes are literally contagious for probably 50%-60% of users. When a few downvoted roll in to something slightly nuanced, the already small likelihood that people could engage with the nuance drops to absolute zero and the downvotes just keep piling up. Says quite a lot.