Some accounts are deleting their posts after a few downvotes. It’s devastating on communities like c/asklemmy.
Lemmy doesn’t track an account’s karma like reddit. So, all downvotes will be isolated to your post or comment and won’t affect your account—unless you wrote something truly horrible.
Remember lemmy is a community effort. Deleting a post also removes all comments on it. So you are not only robbing the effort others put in, you are actively removing knowledge from the fediverse. Others won’t be able to find it through search and lemmy will seem lonelier than it already is.
This is one of my (many) issues with reddit. The underlaying structure causes some users to modulate their behavior in order to stay in social good graces. At least a few years ago, some subs would ban you for being a member of a sub they didn’t like, or if you didn’t have enough karma, or whatever. Considering that karma is determined by the community, agreeing with the average opinion is incentivized and the converse is the same. This actively discourages discourse, while encouraging circlejerking. I’m not implying that people are just going around and posting “this, 100 times this” on everything so they can max out their karma score, but I do think it’s leading to an unhealthy smoothing of opinions that’s gone too far into the realm of banality.
While I do think it’s good to run everything we say through Socrates’ triple filter because that’s aligned with the higher ideal of caring for the state of the community, I don’t think we should concern ourselves with the question, “will other people like me for saying this”.