The issue is that I often don’t want to comment and engage with some of the psychos that show up on the internet. Downvotes are a passive way to help move hateful/ignorant comments to the bottom of the thread. Having downvotes publicly accessible is giving these psychos a way to directly engage back with you.

I don’t think Lemmy is big enough for more high profile people to come here. The main reason celebrities do AMAs are for publicity for whatever they’re promoting. Lemmy has way less total users than /r/iama has.

I’ve been harassed across subreddits before by one person because I disagreed with them on something. You can block them but all the sudden they pop up on another account. Some people are just crazy.

I think the issue is just that having votes publicly accessible can lead to harassment. Sometimes I want to downvote bigots or idiots and not want the possibility of them engaging with me.

They could have just straight up said, “hey, we are getting rid of third party apps because we need to consolidate where our users browse reddit for our IPO”. I would have been annoyed, but the way they pretended that all that TPA devs were too unreasonable to work with their outrageous terms genuinely pissed me the fuck off.

The issue with Yang is that he’s proposing cutting other social safety nets and replacing them with UBI which would put a lot of people in worse situations. UBI would be great but we also need robust social programs.