Alright and then this can be it for me as I’m pretty sure we won’t reach a consensus.
What would you say of “people downvoting posts about football and basketball because they don’t care about it”? Or my posts that were on the emacs community, which has about 10 active users per month? Or etc
I would say the edge cases for this don’t justify the blanket guideline and if they did it could be worded (and likely similarly ignored) like reddit did. I would also say situations like the language one can be implement with a UI fix. Plenty of small communities both here and on reddit grew despite being “niche” or even just not popular.
You seem to understand that we’re are not talking about your case, but you still want to keep your downvote based on a flawed assumption.
No. You don’t seem to understand that you’re providing guidelines that are incompatible with voting. You want to talk about edge cases in which your guideline can function and makes sense. I’m providing you far more likely and apparent cases where it doesn’t. Your guideline means someone would be breaking them even if downvoting content that breaks the rules of conduct I.e using it directly as intended. I’d consider guidelines for not downvoting stuff solely because you don’t like it for “reasons” before your guideline. Which I’d argue being a lot of former redditors, Lemmy largely inherited.
The idea of even a guideline against shielding communities from negative engagement while affording all the benefits of positive engagement isn’t worth the odd niche community post being spared a couple downvotes from people who don’t know how to use it. If individual communities want to only display upvotes, then goes nuts since that makes way more sense. I doubt I was the first but I’d guess most votes are from people who share my numerous strong views on it. Anyway, as I alluded to before if you can’t understand my position after this many paragraphs then we probably better call it a day. Have a good one.