Good. It’s better to have more instances, than larger instances (see: Reddit, Threads).

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.

Some instances don’t allow downvoting. It doesn’t really matter, mass upvoting the remaining content has the same effect.