Ratings aren't "downvotes", they do not signify whether an opinion has merit or not, they communicate the thoughts of others about how they feel about your posts to you even if they wouldn't otherwise make a post in text to reply to you. As far as your argument goes, yes, well, it's true that the 'Farms has hiveminds and cliques that are trying to establish officially allowed opinions or hate jerks against other posters, but I do think that putting effort into an argument won't make you usually seem stupid to others but you usually have to tread the waters a little carefully because if you come out swinging towards an established minicommunity, you'll get smacked on your ass because your opinions are "wrong". This imo has less to do with the fact that the Farms are "dumber", and more of a symptom of lolcows having more established followings and the threads being more formulaic, which means that they develop a certain culture and people who post there without knowing the norms of the thread get singled out.
The Shaner thread attracted an incredible amount of fucktarded weening when Shaner came on the 'Farms. I agree that ultimately closing it was more because Null didn't like it personally, but nuking Shaner's accounts was absolutely the right idea because people became more autistic than the lolcow when Shaner was around. The Shaner thread was funny, when Shaner wasn't around, but when he was, the thread was just inflated Clydebots trying to fellate themselves by screaming at Lennayyy.
