if the things they support or object to would cause harassment or harm from people who know who they are

I could easily see an Amazon worker getting fired because they were logged upvoting pro-union threads.

This prompts two thoughts for me.

First - what you’re describing is just the generalised version of having the identity behind your account known. In your example, upvotes and downvotes don’t need to be visible in order for Amazon to see your comments on pro-union threads; and I think comments, rather than votes, are far more likely to be used against an employee in this way.

Second - I think what you’re describing exposes the question of what downvotes actually are, because I don’t think they can always be interpreted as showing support or objection. My understanding is that on Reddit, as a social news aggregator, upvotes and downvotes were originally a mechanism for deciding whether the content of a link was relevant and interesting to the sub, or irrelevant and boring - it was all tied to the algorithm as a way of pushing interesting content up the page. But at some point, as Reddit grew, that morphed into using upvotes and downvotes to agree or disagree with opinions (especially political opinions) being expressed.

I’m okay with ‘upvote to agree’, but I still find this use of the downvote button in the comment section is troubling, and my hope is that Reddit’s ‘downvote to disagree’ culture doesn’t carry over to kbin and Lemmy.

The other day I was having a perfectly civilised discussion with someone on one of the UK communities about one aspect of health policy (whether England should follow Wales and Scotland’s path of extending free prescriptions to people on very high incomes in the name of universality, or whether England was right to focus its health budget on other health priorities like GP availability or surgery waiting lists). The discussion was perfectly polite yet the other person was downvoting each of my responses - they probably didn’t realise I could see this and I didn’t call them out on it. It made me wonder about their thought process though - we were having a good discussion, neither of us was being rude or insulting, and yet each time I took the time to respond to them, they just reflexively downvoted me before responding themselves. That struck me as poor etiquette in a conversation - one of those toxic features of anonymous online interactions that few people would try to replicate in real life.

My hope is that ‘downvote to disagree’ doesn’t take hold here in the way it did on Reddit, and that visible downvotes will encourage a bit more trigger discipline around the downvote button. Downvote when there’s cause - material that’s not relevant to the sub, or that’s low quality / low effort, or people behaving in a way that’s rude or insulting or aggressive or trolling - and be prepared to justify your downvotes if needed. The culture here can better than what Reddit became.