I both love and hate the upvote/downvote mechanic. I like seeing quality posts bubble to the top, I also like seeing the general consensus of lurkers, but I don't like circlejerk posts or that downvoted comments get dogpiled on, which often both result in a toxic, self-righteous flame war. And the solution is obviously not deleting the downvoted comments, because then you're just censoring unpopular opinions.

I think something worth trying would be not visually distinguishing between posts with no votes and posts with more negative than positive votes. I think an instance could enforce this on their own communities with only positive results.

The only counter argument is that dishonest arguments can't be "buried" by downvotes (hidden behind a "[show]" button). Another strategy would be to allow burying, but somehow throttle the responses to them; maybe limit the comment depth, or limit the number of responses per user, or allow users to flag flame war threads as "unproductive" which at some point would block further responses.

To be clear, I don't think the lemmy "spec" should adopt any of these measures, I think these regulations should be decided by instance/community mods, and up to the users to regulate and provide feedback on.