Legit, I’m not sure what ratio I’d be at, but I pepper in a goodly number of downs nowadays because there’s been a shift in off topic posts, and comments that are similarly out of place or just so bad that they merit the mark.

Either that or I’m noticing them more, I dunno. I did take a semi break from lemmy for a while, so maybe that break did shift my awareness of such things.

Way I see it, unless someone is down voting everything, and doing so regularly, that’s part of the point of them existing. It’s a way of weighting the relative merits of a given post or comment. Is it on topic? Is it useful and fitting for the thread/community? Is it nasty enough to be out of line? There’s more reasons to down vote than there are reasons to up, overall.