Given OP’s complaint, I assumed OP would be unusually sensitive to even small amounts of discouragement (as magnifying small negatives is a frequent habit of people with depression/anxiety problems). As such, when I saw a −1 in the comment thread where I was directly conversing with the OP, I voted them back up to zero. This is because I do not want to discourage someone reaching out for psychological help, even if they are probably asking for help from a community that might not be focused on providing appropriate help.
That doesn’t mean that we should encourage it (signal-to-noise ratio is a thing), but someone with depression may well see −1 as evidence that they should shut up and leave the world alone, because several other people may have read through the thread, decided that granting −1 karma for that post was appropriate, and didn’t vote back up to zero. (For the record, I do not think that is what actually happened. Random downvotes from anon trolls are fairly common on the Internet.)
I hope you don’t mean that. Caving to one anonymous bully is pretty sad.
Given OP’s complaint, I assumed OP would be unusually sensitive to even small amounts of discouragement (as magnifying small negatives is a frequent habit of people with depression/anxiety problems). As such, when I saw a −1 in the comment thread where I was directly conversing with the OP, I voted them back up to zero. This is because I do not want to discourage someone reaching out for psychological help, even if they are probably asking for help from a community that might not be focused on providing appropriate help.
That doesn’t mean that we should encourage it (signal-to-noise ratio is a thing), but someone with depression may well see −1 as evidence that they should shut up and leave the world alone, because several other people may have read through the thread, decided that granting −1 karma for that post was appropriate, and didn’t vote back up to zero. (For the record, I do not think that is what actually happened. Random downvotes from anon trolls are fairly common on the Internet.)