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Correct. And communities aspire for visibility. So someone coming into a community to downvote all the posts will potentially be banned for harming that communities visibility.
Because the point of the Fediverse is to grow, not degrade. Also, it's not downvoting per se that is viewed as inherently harmful - it's bulk downvoting of posts. If someone who doesn’t like metal music enters !metal@lemmy.world and downvotes every post there - and commits themselves to doing it to every new post, this hurts their visibility across the Fediverse. Would you not say its reasonable, in this specific hypothetical, for the community owner to ban a user who does that?
A newly made post that gets downvoted to 0 quickly after being posted is rendered effectively invisible on the fediverse. I’ll give you my own experience: When I was growing !television@lemm.ee before lemm.ee shut down, the community collected about 5 frequent downvoters. None of these accounts ever upvoted anything. They never participated by posting or commenting anything on the community. In a few cases, two of the accounts had no posting history on the fediverse at all. They existed purely to downvote. Whether because they didn’t like television as a topic, or hated news articles being posted - I don’t know. But they would, between them, always downvote posts and sometimes do so early - deprecating their visibility. After I banned them after a time, I noticed an improvement on the community.
If they're not interested in metal music then they're not ever going to be part of the community, so if they don't want to see anything there - there can just block the community. That's what the block button for communities you don't like is for.
Why should a metal community orientate itself and placate itself to what people who don't like metal like? If someone started downvoting all metal music videos on the community and said they were doing so because they don't like metal, then why would I keep them around to keep doing that?
I don't look at it anymore for the most part. Most people upvote as a matter of normality. I want content to spread across the fediverse.
The community was much smaller then, and they would hurt visibility by getting in quickly and preventing the posts from trending. I don't really know how you can also claim that multiple accounts with no post history, and sometimes no upvoting history were remotely authentic accounts sincerely interested in meaningfully positively impacting the fediverse.
You asked, I answered. :shrug:
The point is non-community members downvoting everything. When there are five people active in a community, five non-communists downvoting everything can seriously hurt the community's reach even when people are browsing their subs with a scaled sort.