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.

This isn’t a problem that’s unique to “capitalism”. It’s a monopoly problem. Even in other economy types this problem would exist. For example, with communism almost everything would be a monopoly.

A free market is supposed to provide us multiple options to take our business, but we need regulation to keep capitalism in check.

We do have laws against monopolies, and there is already a case against Live Nation/Ticketmaster:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Live_Nation_Entertainment

The way to really fix this is through our legal system and representatives. We need to pressure our representatives to pass better laws to prevent this from happening again as well as electing officials who actual care about issues like this.