Lemmy is loosing users - programming.dev

How can we make it more popular?

More upvoting of posts.

I know that sounds a bit dumb/lame, but when I first got here and every post had like 5 upvotes, maybe 20 and then maybe once a week you’d see one with more than 100, it was jarring. Made the place feel empty and without interaction. Which it’s really not, but that was my and I think perhaps a lot of peoples’ first impression.

There’s also a trend of downvoting things ‘just because’. Not sure if it’s bots or just users who are trying to cater their feed by downvoting things they don’t like. But if people just blind downvote with no engagement, I feel like it discourages people from posting. This place needs to be more hospitable than StackOverflow.
My personal rule here and the other site has always been that I only downvote spam, misinformation, and actively malicious posts
I also actively downvoted stuff that didn’t belong on the subspace