I’ve never heard this. I’m pretty sure the internet has decided otherwise.

This is not Reddit.

Alright, hot take: This isn’t the case, especially on Lemmy/kbin. Since upvotes/downvotes don’t influence sorting, and scores aren’t totaled into a single number, there’s not really any downside to downvoting someone for just being a shitty opinion or something. If anything, it’s actively informative that this-many-people thought this guy was dumb, but _this* many people thought it was good.

Up and down buttons started off as “like” and “dislike” buttons. That is what it’s always meant, and is likely to continue being how most people use them

I mean, you practically asked for the downvotes. (Also, if that is truely the intent, then they’ve made some critical errors in UX design)