I’m very curious about the reasoning different people use when deciding to downvote a post or comment. Often, when something gets “heavily” downvoted, the OP will ask some variation of “why the downvotes?”. This is sometimes answered with sincere criticism, but sometimes is received even more poorly than the original offending post.
Do you downvote people who ask “why the downvotes?”? What informs the decision?
I think it’s simpler than that. By default, Lemmy/piefed/etc. orders comments by top using upvotes and downvotes.
So if you want something to move up and be more visible you upvote it. If you want something to move down and be less visible, you downvote it.
The difference between likes/dislikes is that you don’t need to like something or dislike something to up/down vote it. You might like something but think it doesn’t contribute or is in the wrong comm or even just that the other comments should be higher up than it. There doesn’t need to be an assumption of negative judgement (although often there is anyway), they’re tools for arranging comment/post order.