National Science Foundation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms of the grant it would have to follow.
“These terms included affirming the statement that we ‘do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,’” Crary noted. “This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole.”
I mean, votes are public in the fediverse. I wouldn’t try to read into the reasoning from a single downvoter too much though.
One downvote could be accidental. 2 downvotes in the same thread makes that seem less likely.
Downvoting/Upvoting doesn’t mean the same thing that it does for everyone. Some use it as an agree/disagree. Some use it for whether a comment is productive and adds to the conversation or not. Some use it as a visibility score whether they think a comment should be seen by others first or whether there are other comments that are better. Some may agree with most everything in a comment except for one part and then downvote because of that.
I thought the point of the system is to mark down out of context comments that doesn’t contribute to the post and not a I disagree button or super upvote.
That might be the point of the system but in reality it is definitely used for like/dislike. Someone says that they like Windows and/or dislike Linux and they are guaranteed to get downvotes.
Well, this isn’t exactly stackoverflow…!
It is rare for things to be out of context…
Really, upvotes and downvotes are more or less… just… whatever made most people satisfied enough with a comment that they wanted to say they dis-/-liked it.