Yes, servers can disable downvotes. Beehaw does that, for instance. I’m on lemmy.world which allows both. I prefer both because I think it helps silence bad faith participation with less active moderation, but I respect that some places don’t want it.
I don’t mind if you take Earl Gray for your tea, or simply earl gray. It’s things like neglecting to put in paragraph breaks and a complete lack of punctuation that really bother me.
I also have a bias against u/ur etc. but I’m annoyingly pedantic about things like that. If Weird Al mocked it in “Word Crimes”, it’s likely on my list of peeves.
And I fully support your hypothesis here!
Regardless of how you choose to write things out, it’s always good to see another feline based username in these parts.