Something I've seen pointed out about Lemmy and I'm starting to notice a little bit occasionally, is that people love 'answering' questions by not really answering and grandstanding a little bit. Someone asks "is there a gen z community?" and the responses they get are things like "who cares about these generation labels?" and no answers to the question.
Here you ask why there's a large amount of downvotes on a particular instance, and not what people's personal philosophy regarding downvotes is, and yet the top answer is someone that came here especially to tell you that they don't care and no one cares.
And these guys are gonna complain about people going to places like Bluesky instead of joining the fediverse. AskReddit was basically the gateway to Reddit for new users.
To try and guess at an answer, even though I'm new here and haven't even seen downvotes for the last few days. I think that people are trying to keep a certain political atmosphere and not let trolls / right wingers / people who are "just asking questions" take over. So votes go hard in that direction. And also I think there's probably a lot more of the types around here that'll have a 'discussion' while downvoting every response they get from you, more than on Reddit. Just going by the sneering that comes with how some harmless questions are answered.
Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.
I've been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there'll be 4 posts instead of 3.
And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I'm always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there's a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.
Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn't be impossible here.