The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
I was referring to bots: whether they downvote one post/comment to -1000, or upvote the rest to +1000, the effect is the same… for anyone sorting by votes.
In regards to people, I agree that downvotes are not really constructive, that’s why beehav.org doesn’t allow them.
But in general, I’m afraid Lemmy will have to end up offering similar vote related features as Reddit: hide vote counts for some period of time, “randomize” them a bit to drive bots crazy, and that kind of stuff.