But keep in mind that nobody (ok at least me 🤣) downvotes you because I want to hurt your feelings or “to silence” you. Don’t get me wrong but I couldn’t care less. I don’t know you, I don’t know your past, what you do, your mindset, your attitude. All I see is a post I don’t agree with and by downvoting I’m just contributing to a statistic that let’s you and other users know how others roughly think about that post.
(I am not the OP nor the person to whom you wrote the above.)
I think downvotes are useful, but not as an “I disagree” with your view, but “I disagree” with how you chose to express your view. In my view, we should upvote someone who disagrees agreeably and intelligently.
In my view, receiving a mass of downvotes SHOULD cause me to pause and think about whether I said something rightly and kindly and on-topic to the matter at hand. A downvote storm shouldn’t bully me into changing my niche position to theirs.
(upvoted, for the record)
Before that for me.
I wrote a Commodore 64 BBS that almost worked – the C64 couldn’t auto-answer the phone so I had to manually respond to an incoming call. Message board traffic became a data line in BASIC and after saving the program would break and re-run which would make that new message available to others to read. Not bad for 1983.
Of course, CompuServe email was already a thing so my little amateur hackaroo was just that.