I completely agree, you’ve summed up my view far better than I could.

There’s also a controversial approach that if you’re debating with someone and you believe in the points you’re making then you should upvote even the comments you disagree.

By doing so the full thread of comments is ranked higher so more people see the incredibly clever points you’re articulating.

This isn’t so relevant on Lemmy right now because it’s still small so you might read all comments on ba post. But it made a massive difference on reddit where there were thousands of comments. So the algorithm becomes very selective.

You have no reason to so I presume you haven’t.

If we were actually in a discussion and you started downvoting all my comments I’d see it as a sign of pettiness and disengage.

I’d probably also tag you as a reminder to myself not to engage with you again.

This is precisely my reason for why they should be public.

In my view downvotes should be used sparingly, only to suppress spam and trolling comments that don’t add to the conversation.

By keeping votes private people just downvote anything they disagree with