To me, a downvote means "what you wrote contributes nothing to the discussion, and should be less visible". If someone downvotes me, I take it as a sign that no further discussion in that direction is meaningful.
"At this point, not enough information exist to answer that question. I have carefully investigated the material provided, and it appears like the necessary information has been deliberately redacted. Given this, the best course would be to avoid speculation."
I think the idea is that what we want to see more of is genuine discussions in good faith using sound arguments, even if we don't personally agree with the viewpoint.
If I'm just tired of seeing certain types of posts I can block them without downvoting their posts.
I made a serious attempt at using ed(1) for a few weeks. Read the book by Michael Lucas and everything. In the end, I kind of do want to see the file I'm editing, etc. But, some features, or lack of features, stuck with me. Do I need a menu item to count words in the file? That's why we have wc -w after all. This can be said about a lot of functionality built into editors. It made me really appreciate the idea of programs that do one thing, and can be combined. But yes, in the end it was too much for me, mostly because I'm not good enough with coreutils.
Isn't this the dilemma? Each type of fediverse project has its own focus, presenting posts in different ways. If we increase interoperability to the point where everything can be presented fully on any service, will each service be able to keep their focus? Would there be a point in having pixelfed when mastodon exists?
I'm not sure it drove Navidson insane, but maybe it presented him a sane choice (staying safe with his wife) and an insane choice (risking everything to find out what is inside). And a certain type of person just can't let it be, even at the cost of everything. Maybe this was inside him all the time, and then the house happened.