You are right, it's true everywhere. It's human nature to be wary of people you don't understand. But, for some things, you'd expect countries that are a lot further ahead in progressivism to be "nicer", especially since, you know, they industrialised and became richer on the backs of poorer countries.
Though I suppose that's very difficult to quantitatively measure exactly - how progressive someone is (on the scale of a country). How more accepting they are than other countries.
But there's also room for letting people air out their issues without being told that "everyone is like this, stop whining". That's literally what the Russian goverment does, they implicitly tell their populace that democracy doesn't work and that this is the best deal they'll ever get.
It doesn't do that for me. It only brings up the menu upon clicking the three dots on the right.
I think my suggestion would only make it more minimalistic.
I don't think I am explaining it right.
The current image lightbox has four buttons at the bottom - (Upvote), (comments), (share), and (menu)
My suggestion is to replace the (upvote) & (comment) buttons with a wide (download) button. Comments can still be opened with a slide up gesture and there are multiple places to upvote.
(Personal assumption) I think people rarely use the comment button and the upvote button in the lightbox itself.