Lemmy.world has a lot of users and more users means more downvotes. It also happens to have a lot of news and political communities which attracts a lot of strong opinions.

Personally, I find the only function of downvotes is to discourage contributing and discourse, and that seems antithetical to what this platform is supposed to be about.

I’m not entirely familiar with the controversy, but from your link it appears that the Lemmy.world admin team announced a moderation policy that didn’t go over too well and now they’re reconsidering.

When someone runs a Lemmy instance, they are the administrators of the instance and have full control over everything that happens on it. By default, users can create accounts and communities on the instance. The user that creates a community is the moderator of that community and can control what gets posted within it. There’s an overlap of authority between the instance admin and the community mod, as they both have the ability to decide what content gets posted, and sometimes that creates issues.

The issue here seems to be that the Lemmy.world admin team doesn’t want community mods “creating narratives” by removing posts they do not agree with. In their rescinded announcement, they give an example that if a user makes a post in a community about how the Earth is flat, the community mod shouldn’t be allowed to remove it. Instead, the community must respond to the post with debate or downvotes. Mods who remove these posts, instead of allowing debate, would be in violation of the instance admin policy and would be stripped of their moderation powers by the admins. The moderator of !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world (and some other community mods) blocked new posts to their community as a protest to the admin decision (which is now on hold).

That’s definitely a terrible take but there’s no reason to downvote it. I don’t think you’re trolling. You just have a different opinion and that’s fine.

This comment

The post was a news story about a sports arena calling a kid to the front and saying Santa got him a new PS5 but they didn’t end up giving him one.

A top comment claimed this is legally considered theft. I replied saying it’s shitty but it’s not legally theft. Got 91 downvotes for that.

All my other downvoted comments come from posting in video game communities about how I don’t think video games need to exist forever.

I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.

The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.