Lemmy was created as a Reddit alternative by Marxist-Leninists, and borrowing from Reddit’s voting system was an explicit design goal.

As for downvoting specifically, I’ll point to muad_dibber’s & darkcalling’s comments: Getting rid of downvotes the way Hexbear did

@darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml calls this below, disagreement without elaboration. That’s a really apt way to put the solution to the burnout you described above, that we often feel when we’re forced to engage with reactionary content when we don’t have the energy to at that moment.

darkcalling’s original comment:

I need downvotes to push down incorrect, idealist, frankly liberal opinions of which a not insignificant amount come from the aforementioned instance.

We either get rid of downvotes and adopt a more brutal moderation policy that sees any liberalism or idealism result in a removal and quick trip to a permanent ban which means more work for mods or we like communists accept liberals occasionally coming in with their little downvotes while utilizing them ourselves as a discipline measure to as a community hold to account liberal, idealist, reactionary, and otherwise wrong opinions that otherwise threaten to poison the minds of learning comrades.

I see this kind of poison frequently on hex bear and frankly it does not encourage anything but low effort, lower the bar emote spamming which does little to measure actual community opinion (a dozen idealists may upvote a bad comment while only 3 people bother to put down bear emojis which are clunky anyways and amount to discourse clogging “same” comments which add nothing.) Downvotes are the elegant solution and so far especially with our recent defederation from world the liberals are not near outnumbering us.

Democratic participation and discipline includes disagreement without elaboration especially when dealing with many opinions which are frankly unstudied and by people who otherwise should have no right to speak.