Trihilis

Well, I don't disagree with you. All I'm saying is that I've personally seen the downvote function being abused a lot. It kinda works for making interesting posts visible but in the comments it usually leads to certain arguments (even civil ones without insulting or trolling) being downvoted and hiding the comment. Karma is honestly meaningless to me, I just enjoy conversations and seeing different opinions even if I disagree with them. I see why it exists and in a perfect world it's a great way to make moderation manageable on bigger platforms (like reddit and lemmy). Sadly we don't live in a perfect world.

Trolling and insults usually break rules and can be reported. Comments like that deserve all the downvotes they get since they detract from discussion and don't add to it. Although honestly most forums I visit deal with that pretty well too (with no karma system in place).

Well ideally that's how downvoting should work yes. In practice it's abused a lot as a "I disagree" button.

Honestly, I don't even like the downvote/upvote system because it promotes censorship and a lot of the times it's just an agree/disagree button. I feel that no matter how right or wrong someone is, they should always be able to express their opinion in a civil manner (obviously there are mods for removing rule breaking posts/comments). Downvoting just kills any discussion.

I made the mistake of not doing this. I was so fed up with reddit that I had to get off there ASAP.

Well said.