I barely voted at all on Reddit, trying to be more engaged here.

I don’t really vote as a way to agree or disagree.

I only downvote if something is inappropriate, else I leave it be. And then I apply my own rule that is to upvote anything(!) that I comment on (yea this post too), no matter what I feel about it.

If something is worth spending time commenting on, it deserves an upvote.

i don't downvote if i disagree but if someone is insulting or something else

Honestly, I was never much into it. When I downloaded my (6 year old) Reddit account data, I had downvoted 9 things.

I think lemmy is too small at the moment to downvote in the same way people did on reddit. It's still growing and we need people to post content to build the site and everyone's engagement, downvotes for just disagreeing are going to discourage a whole new group of people who didn't post on reddit because of getting drowned out in the noise. Look in all the question posts about how people are enjoying lemmy and you'll see a bunch of them.

I've just been moving on and ignoring things I disagree with, no upvote is enough punishment in my eyes. Saying that I've been giving out upvotes to most things to encourage people to post and comment more. If something is clearly gross and offensive it'll get a downvote and possibly a report, but that's so rare in the communities I'm going to. If it's a really off topic comment or whatever then yes it's downvoted because it doesn't belong.

If there's something I really, really disagree with but don't want to get into a conversation about it I'll just block the user. That way I don't have to see or deal with their opinions I disagree with anymore and can just move on with my life.

I guess that's a really, really long winded way of agreeing with you lol. I've been a lot more liberal with the upvotes and have really changed my downvote behaviour too.

i think ive only downvoted 1 offtopic lame comment so far, on lemmy

its not something i do often

in general the process of downvoting should be reserved to offtopic content, poor quality content etc

on reddit the "norm" was to downvote things you disagree with, which is dumb. then you end up with the echochamber problem and such. I once asked a critical question on /r/conservative and i got banned. Asking questions where the answer make them seem ... dumb, was apparently not acceptable. i got downvoted to hell, and eventually banned. for ONE comment :P

My instance has downvoting disabled and honestly I'm glad it is. Downvoting never seemed to add anything to Reddit. If a comment isn't popular then people just won't upvote it

I only downvoted some really racist comments on Reddit and the EA post as well.

You imply that this is systemic. Well its not. Let me help you move past this:

Strongly Agree: +1

Agree: 0

Neutral: 0

Disagree: 0

Strongly Disagree: -1

If you are having trouble with working through this, and you Strongly Strongly Strongly Disagree then there is a 6th option.

Strongly Strongly Strongly Disagree: +1 562-379-4995

I think downvotes should be removed completely. They are useless, if a content is harmful or off topic you can just report it. With massive numbers of bots coming to Lemmy I think downvote brigades will be even more frequent. Why do we need to give a score to everything? Let's just enjoy good content and try to answer to bad one

I've often wondered what removing upvotes and only allowing downvotes on posts, not comments would do. The default behavior would be to not vote at all, but downvoting, especially for chronic reposts might actually be a nice thing. Plus no more karma farming.

I joined Beehaw. We don't even have the option. The ethos is to at least attempt to give the OP the benefit of the doubt when we find problematic content (unless it's just blatantly trolling or in bad faith) and try to educate ignorance.

Otherwise, we just report and move on.

Been wondering if Lemmy should have some sort of variation on redditquette, particularly

Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.

Which if you weren't aware was a non binding unofficial rule on reddit

I don't think downvoting is a good thing. The argument is always "send a message to the user without engaging" but what you are doing is discouraging those users from posting and commenting at all.

I feel like upvoting content you agree with is a better method than downvoting content you don't agree with.