I’m on lemmy.sdf.org and I currently see 18 upvotes, 0 downvotes on bdonvr’s comment.

Hmm, I see that same post with zero downvotes presently and I’m on neither beehaw nor lemmy.world. I suspect that downvoting beehaw from a remote instance might be local to that specific instance, but I’m not certain.

There’s no total karma for a user yet, yes. So the perverse incentive to make number go up at all costs isn’t quite as wild as it is in Reddit.

As I wander around Lemmy more I’m also noticing that there’s a lot of opportunity for instances to have their own subcultures, which goes against the “It doesn’t matter which Lemmy instance you use” advice I’ve seen in a couple places. It definitely seems prudent to choose an instance that has an admin team and/or a theme you like, because instance-local content is going to be the easiest to find. The instance I chose is decently small and chill, but I’ve seen some other instances with a big focus on memes. To each their own!

I’m also eyeballing Tildes as a Reddit alternative, and their dev has an interesting approach to increasing signal-to-noise ratio. They don’t have downvotes, but they have labels that affect how comments are sorted, with the joke and noise labels moving comments down in the sort by a pretty significant amount.

you have my updoot

I jest. Ultimately without some sort of mechanic that disincentivizes noisy, low-effort joke comments there’s not going to be some sort of magical cultural shift. I’m just arriving, but from what I’m seeing Lemmy doesn’t have any sort of design that will skew comments towards actual discussion and away from jokes/noise in any meaningful way.