I sat out the 1972 election between Nixon and Humphrey. Many sat out 2000 and 2016 elections. Here are the consequences.
This comment was deleted, but it shouldn’t have been. The code to aggressively delete comments from users who don’t have enough data to rank them, meaning potentially throwaway accounts, was malfunctioning, and deleted everything from any accounts without recent activity. It’s only supposed to trigger if that user has some downvotes, but it was deleting anything.
I’ve fixed the code and restored the comment.
And yes, I’m aware of the irony involved. To answer your point, I picked a terrible name for this community. People are not required to upvote you or agree with you, or even be nice to you. It’s meant as a place without toxic low-effort trolling, but certainly people are allowed to hit the downvote button to quickly express disapproval in addition to giving some more well-considered reasons for disagreeing with the stated argument.
What I was going for, unsuccessfully, by saying “pleasant” was that this person can say something like this viewpoint, and other people can disagree with them, but it doesn’t turn into a dumpster fire of personal insults, changes of subject, and wild accusations. At that, I think it’s succeeding, looking at this thread. People are not agreeing but it’s a lot calmer than an equivalent thread in a lot of Lemmy’s politics communities would be.