I haven't seen a huge shift overall

What I have noticed is more early down votes that later get raised back into the positive.

Not sure why it is, though it did roughly coincide wit the most recent reddit migration. But that isn't enough to assume causation. It's a possibility, just not conclusive since it could be any number of things.

It does feel like there's a new wave of change, I have no idea if it's due to new reddit refugees or general discontent. But yes, there does seem to be a lot more down voting, more quarrelsome comments, less cohesion within some communities.

There's also been a few posts sprinkled across instances discussing some accounts that do nothing but down vote. No comments, no posts, just down votes

I suspect checking the data isn't possible?

Define nonpolitical.

So you're saying that nonpolitical posts are getting more downvotes?

This was posted a few days ago and I pointed out how "why are men" is the kind of language that pushes people to the manosphere and we should be using more person specific language to talk crap about those types of people. I got downvoted. I called out the downvoters and got further downvoted for talking about downvotes. If there were good people on lemmy that wouldn't have happened. My comment on sexist language got twisted into a comment about downvotes all because someone clapped back and vote momentum.

::gestures to username::

Lemmy is already cooked don't get your hopes up