Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
How it was used is how I want it to be used. I want to know the consensus of the community of which I participate. I DO NOT agree that downvote should only be used for comments that “do not contribute”. That’s reddit and I do not want lemmy to be reddit.
Downvote = I think this content is bad
If I’m in an instance for the latest Marvel movie, and the community overwhelmingly hates it, I want to know that by seeing how many downvotes it received.
upvote-only does make the comment section look dead
Cool! Yeah, what you’re saying makes sense. I might be changing my mind a little bit, we’ll see how it all turns out. Thanks for the response! :)