Yeah, I totally agree. I like to see all new posts and downvote everything except the few posts that I like. If everybody did the same, and there were only a few posts that actually got upvotes after all the downvotes, then too bad for the posters. It's not like I care about how they feel after getting downvoted to oblivion, if they feel bad they can get the fuck out of here for all I care. /s
Don't tell me what to do, I'll downvote everything I dislike. I don't care what you think is good, neutral or poor content. And that's exactly the issue, I see the all feed and downvote most of the content and only upvote what I actually like, and many people do the same.
If people like you who downvote what they dislike lost their privilege to downvote, like was the case in slashdot, then I would agree.
Slashdot voting system
https://beehaw.org/comment/208569
this was something I loved about slashdot moderation. When voting, people had to specify the reason for the vote. +1 funny, +1 insightful, +1 informative, -1 troll, -1 misleading, etc.
That way you can, for example, set in your user preferences to ignore positive votes for comedy, and put extra value on informative votes.
Then, to keep people from spamming up/down votes and to encourage them to think about their choices, they only gave out a limited number of moderation points to readers. So you’d have to choose which comments to spend your 5 points on.
Then finally, they had ‘meta moderation’ where you’d be shown a comment, and asked “would a vote of insightful be appropriate for this comment” to catch people who down-voted out of disagreement or personal vendetta. Any users who regularly mis-voted would stop receiving the ability to vote.
I don’t think this is directly applicable to a federated system, but I do think it’s one of the best-thought-out voting systems ever created for a discussion board.
edit: a couple other points i liked about it:
Comments were capped at (iirc) +5 and -1. Further votes wouldn’t change the comment’s score.
User karma wasn’t shown. The user page would just say Karma: good. Or Excellent, or poor, or some other vague term.
I agree with the decision but disagree with the reasons. And I believe a community poll should have been held before the change.
The actual reasons I think downvotes shouldn't be used are those mentioned in Is it worth having downvotes?: because it discourages people from posting content, especially if they post their own nudes and receive downvotes, and it makes the content from this instance less visible in other instances. Those two result in less content overall.