Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
Downvotes can be useful in certain contexts, like when you visit a thread and are looking for factual information, such as the answer to a tech question. I don’t want to accidentally follow someone’s bad advice because the bad advice didn’t have any downvotes nor any responses as to why it was wrong.
It’s not perfect, but voting is a quick, often effective method of fact checking.
It’s more of a vibe check than a fact check. But I think it’s definitely useful for the network to self moderate since mods are pretty much entirely voluntary on Lemmy.
Just to give a concrete example, there are a couple blatantly political posts on !fediverse. Do they belong there? Absolutely not. But by the time I saw them days later, the damage was done and they were already taken care of by downvotes. Should I really mod remove a week old post with 50 downvotes? The discussion there about why it didn’t belong was fine, and didn’t need to be hidden further.
