If the objective is incentivizing good behavior, here’s another idea: reward upvoting and make it costly to downvote. Details TBD but other forums have done it and it works.

A simple way is to make downvotes "cost" more clicks. For example:

• if you want to upvote someone, you click the arrow up button and you're done.
• if you want to downvote someone, you click the arrow down button, then a pop-up confirming it.

It isn't too much of a deal if you downvote people sparingly, but if you're consistently downvoting others it would get annoying.

Additionally, PieFed has a feature in line with your idea: up/downvoting people gives you "attitude", and if your attitude is too low (too many downvotes in comparison with upvotes), a warning mark appears near your username. Mods can also use this as a piece of info to decide how to handle you, as users who are consistently downvoting others are typically combative.

OK but there are people you just don't want to see and that shouldn't be able to bother you. Just because you project what you would do on others doesn't mean that others will do that. The current block on Lemmy is just a hide feature, every other social media has a working block feature.

A echo chamber comes when toxic assholes can troll normal people out of Lemmy, wich is the current state of matter.

I can already block entire instances along with every single user there. I don't see why I should care if that's what someone wants to do.