Yes indeed, but they mattered much more on reddit. If you didn’t have enough upvotes you couldn’t post or comment in some subs, and if you were heavily downvoted in a subreddit you got comment rate limited - so if you went against the grain people would downvote you to silence your dissenting voice and prevent an actual conversation. Also downvoted comments weren’t just lower down the page, they were often minimised, although that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Case in point, I’ve been arguing with people on lemmygrad today, and of course I’m getting heavily downvoted. If it was reddit I wouldn’t even be able to reply after the first couple comments.
Yes indeed, but they mattered much more on reddit. If you didn’t have enough upvotes you couldn’t post or comment in some subs, and if you were heavily downvoted in a subreddit you got comment rate limited - so if you went against the grain people would downvote you to silence your dissenting voice and prevent an actual conversation. Also downvoted comments weren’t just lower down the page, they were often minimised, although that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Case in point, I’ve been arguing with people on lemmygrad today, and of course I’m getting heavily downvoted. If it was reddit I wouldn’t even be able to reply after the first couple comments.