Unfortunately so. The original goal of downvotes in the reddiquette used to say that downvotes were meant for posts and comments that were uninteresting/spam and didn’t contribute to the discussion, but unfortunately most people use it to shut down viewpoints they don’t agree with.
Reddit had, historically, been pretty good about the first few posts in an article complementing or rebutting the headline (particularly when the OP is controversial). Now the degree of fake engagement has made that harder to come by, simply because its hard to procedurally generate a rational set of ideas.
But in more insular and criticism-hostile communities, you’d regularly see a “Fuck <Thing We All Don’t Like>” as the most upvoted comment, with any critique or nuance buried under a hill of downvotes. You’ll also see some variation of Fed-jacking/Bot-tagging used to rebut any thoughtful criticism.
In fairness, we see it around here, too. People get dogpiled for having an .ml source account. People get tagged as “Russian Bot” or “CCP Tankie” for expressing the least bit of criticism of US/UK foreign policy. There’s just an orgy of hate in social media, even in areas that don’t explicitly encourage it.
Reddiquette doesn’t work when you see in-group shitposts as positive contributions and outsider critiques as inconsequential spam. Doubly so when the mods are pushing a particular agenda.
