For me a big thing is that because Lemmy is so small, it’s not diverse. It’s mostly liberal-to-leftist nerds from America and Western Europe. I roll my eyes and scroll past whenever there’s a post about any Asian country because you know it’s just gonna be a bunch of foreigners (whose exposure to the country is limited to news headlines) pretending they know anything. And unlike Reddit there are seldom any locals available to set people straight.
I don’t think they did. I just checked. Some subs disable downvotes I’m sure but they still exist in the site as a whole.