My three IDE’s of choice in order of preference:

1. EMacs: ultimative workhorse which can do many more - especially with org-mode (however, time intensive to configure which is why I used also ChatGPT to get it done)

2. VSCodium: easy to manage almost anything due to its huge number of extensions

3. Vim: don’t know, sometimes I feel the need to work with Vim and it’s many shortcuts

All are free and open source.

1. In my opinion, you’re doing a great job by not enabling downvotes. Every user can see how many votes their comment has, which should be enough for them to gauge how well their comment is received. 👍

2. I haven’t been on Stack Overflow for a long time (around 15 years ago). Back then, I was mostly focused on statistics and programming in R. It’s true that rude responses were rare, especially in the sense that the OP should have known the answer beforehand or could have researched it themselves before asking. But yes, I never saw personal attacks.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you wrote on Reddit, but from what I read, there was nothing even remotely offensive. You simply provided information. Downvoting you for that is just silly.

The downvotes you’re getting here on Lemmy for your comment are equally baseless (current status: 0). It just shows that some people have enough energy to downvote, but not enough to engage in a discussion. Maybe they should save that energy for something more constructive.

Some newspaper forums require identity verification (through paid subscriptions, social media accounts, etc.). These forums are generally much more civil - and we all know why.

I find the concept of downvoting very toxic and discouraging. It can potentially prevent people to express different views, something a discussion and our personal development is thriving on. It can be well seen on Reddit and even on Lemmy, where people with different views get sometimes heavily downvoted. It is something I consider to be close to “cancel culture” - a majority decides not to like your opinion, so it tries to silence you by voting you “out”. I would really love to see that Lemmy removes this feature and just allows to upvote - so you can upvote a comment or not, but you cannot downvote a comment.