How motivating do you think it is to post to smaller communities just to get an unrepresentative number of downvoters right off the bat? I can’t speak for OP but I’m sure there are plenty that don’t post or reply at all because of it.

I think at its core downvoting can be fine but on smaller platforms it’s easily abused as a form of content suppression, bullying, etc. Lemmy seems to be particularly prone to account hopping downvote spam, which sucks but it is what it is.

Thankfully Lemmy is flexible enough to create what you want more privately if one is so inclined. I’m smoking weed about it.