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I'll be honest, a quick review of this thread did not clearly reveal who was downvoting who for what. My position, and this other person's, is that downvoting opinions is bad manners and toxic to healthy discussion. If there was genuinely harmful advice there, then OK, downvote away.
(Obviously these days the word "harmful" is thrown around liberally so this probably just puts us back to square one.)
It seems you might not understand what downvotes are for then. Downvotes are for things that do not contribute to discussion so things like insults or actively dangerous suggestions should be downvoted.
Suggesting what is a very typical path to addiction for addicts is very bad advice and should not be shared. When someone is foolish enough to do so it should be downvoted because the whole discussion is toxic
@JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world is on somewhat of a crusade against downvotes. They have quite a few comments like that, where they get personally offended by the concept that someone might not like what someone else has to say.
In this thread it was super clear who was downvoting and why. The first comment in this thread was just about clarifying that.
It's true. For me, to downvote an opinion (and this is what the vast majority of downvoting is) is the virtual equivalent of slapping someone in the face, or telling them to shut up. We don't do it in person, we shouldn't do it virtually.
That's your problem then. A downvote is not a slap in the face. It is a very soft way of saying "I disagree" or "I don't like what you are saying".
And yes, we do that in real life.
There is no expectation that everyone has to agree with you, either offline or online.
If you have such a big issue with downvotes and such an enormous misunderstanding what they are, move to an instance that has downvotes disabled and you will never see a downvote again.
A downvote is softer than a negative comment, and if you think a downvote is a slap in the face, how should I interpret your negative comment? A kick in the face?
Egregious straw man, obviously I don't think that.
Says who? You? What if it were you "misunderstanding" this? I know your version is the majority one, but there are plenty of people who agree with me that downvoting is toxic, hence the existence of downvote-free instances.
The big difference, to bore you with what you must already know, is that a downvote affects in most default configs the visibility of the comment. So it's effectively a mild form of censorship, which IMO is not "softer" than a negative reply. And it's certainly not better than than a constructive negative reply, which, believe it or not, is possible to do.
The best argument I have seen for your case is that downvoting provides an off-ramp for potentially sterile conflict. I.e. people hit the downvote button instead of replying with rage. That's a decent pragmatic argument. But whatever reason I personally manage to control my rage at other people's "wrong" opinions, so I don't think it's too much to ask them to do the same.
It's not a form of censorship, it's a form of democracy.
If you are not ok with a downvote reducing visibility, then by extension you should hate upvotes just as much, since they reduce the visibility of everything else.