True. I’ve noticed this happening more in recent years than ever before, too.

Not to mention that Google is also terrible for retrieving some (most?) kinds of information. It can work with basic facts but then you’re still relying on Google (or any other search engine) not to omit other salient facts or sources.

I was like you and mainly lurked for this reason, too. The fediverse can be a lot friendlier. The atmosphere had changed a little since the latest Reddit exodus. Hopefully, most of the toxicity of that platform is left behind.

It might be helpful to reiterate that knowledge isn’t fixed and the while Google provides one answer, we could get a better answer after a discussion. So keep asking questions!

As AlmightySnoo said, there’s no karma on Lemmy.

Up/down votes only relate to individual comments/posts. You can turn these off in the settings so you don’t see them. If this kind of thing affects your mental health, I’d recommend that.

If you do, you won’t see upvotes, either, I don’t think. But that’s good because even if you could turn off downvotes, you’d still be able to compare the number of upvotes between your comments and know whether a comment is less popular than previous comments. That’s unhealthy, too.

Richard Seymour’s Twittering Machine is a good book about the darker side of social media. He doesn’t offer a checklist for individuals to ‘fix’ the bad effects of social media use, but his analysis is revealing and may help you to identify the problems so as to alter your relationship with mechanisms like voting, boosting, etc. It may have some triggering stories, though, so read with caution and take a break (either reading him or from using social media) to let your mental health recover.