In the early days of the platform Bernie and a few others did a lot of the downvoting, back then referred to as flagging and he usually did it in anger with mean words. As a result he set that into the culture, some type of a weird power thing, where downvoting is down with mean words and accusations.

That seems to be fading now. Most downvotes are not a big deal unless you have an over-zealous huge account repeatedly zeroing smaller accounts.

It seems like a more level headed maturity is going into curation these days and fun is returning.