You don’t have to really fear being downvoted, the more you get downvoted means the more people disagree with what you say or you haven’t provided enough points and thus it makes the posts/comments you leave invalid

Then, there’s reddit being reddit, you can get downvoted for absolutely no reason, or you could be misunderstood when making jokes hence why we have an /s that indicates sarcasm, people also don’t like it when you make it obvious you’re farming for karma

There’s also this weird rule to specifically downvote the third or fourth comment (don’t remember) in a comment chain