I agree that it would be better if people used votes as a marker of quality, but strongly disagree on moderation action based on voting.
Personally, there’s three scenarios when I use downvotes w/o commenting:
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Someone has already voiced the reason
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I don’t have time/energy to comment
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The target is a censored echo-chamber that will ban anyone who disagrees (can’t vote/show disapproval if you’re banned) - example would be .ml communities having moments about how stalinist USSR did nothing wrong.
Anyway, once a post from a community rises sufficiently to pop up on all, it becomes a part of the larger discussion, and voting will shift towards the opinions of the larger fediverse. This is also usually when communities get discovered by more people. If a community doesn’t want the engagement of the wider user-base, a closed blog may be more suitable as a forum, or alternatively have an instance w/o downvoting.
When browsing all or new I do so both to break out of my bubble and to vote on content (usually stuff I find interesting).
Whilst I agree that some mods may be overzealous and that the fediverse has a serious slant, you also seem to have behaved very uncivilly.
In any case, unlike reddit, there are many options. When lemmy.ml/c/world bans me for criticizing genocides comitted by the USSR & CCP I can still post to lemmy.world/c/world or even create my own community for world news elsewhere.