For me, it’s the lack of diversity in opinions. IDK about you but I’ve only seen people from here and lemmygrad.ml, and nearly everyone is pretty far left. I’m not having a big problem with it, but the site is very, umm, single-minded.
And this mind is particularly hostile to my ideas
People will mostly stop down-voting if it is easy to figure out who down-voted. And then you end up with up-votes only, similar to likes on other social networks. There is a lot to be said about pros and cons of either system, but giving people some popular feed-back that they might be on a wrong track has some benefits IMHO.
Eventually we’ll add a user setting to hide scores, which would mitigate a lot of ppls anxiety about seeing scores / downvotes.
We had a similar idea in lemmur, though we were thinking about the bias it causes rather than the anxiety. But of course anxiety about scores is also a very valid reason to hide them. Therefore we will hold off with implementing it and wait for the official user setting to appear :)
From a reader perspective I find it to be more cathartic to downvote an idea i disagree with than educational as a post maker that my opinion is unpopular. Especially if someone indiscriminately starts downvoting be because of a grudge. If anything it makes me think “wow these people are ignorant.” This is admittedly self-centered, but with anonymity on the internet, and a lot of the half-baked raw thoughts that get shared on forums like this, I get the perspective that’s what most posters would feel like when they receive downvotes. I’ve certainly witnessed it on Lemmy where people make angry comments calling out downvoters for downvoting instead of replying with counterpoints. I agree with your points in theory but from a behavioural perspective I think anonymous downvoting might discourage courage to post new or controversial ideas.