I am predicting that before the company goes bankrupt, Reddit will remove downvotes in an effort to prevent users from expressing negative sentiment. This happened a few years ago on YouTube after YouTube Rewind became the world’s most disliked video, several years in a row. This was embarrassing for the company because it revealed the discontent of the userbase.
Since expressing discontent is bad for their reputation, and manually removing dislikes is a time consuming task, removing the downvote button altogether for the sake of “preventing bullying” is likely the next step for Reddit.
Sounds like the beehaw.org instance is more your thing
I can see the value in that but in these smaller websites the more activity the better, and they already cut lemmy.world out 🫤
They’re worried about spam bots iirc; maybe once Lemmy gets better moderation tools they’ll open up again, though perhaps they also just need self-contained communities with their own moderators like other instances instead of trying to moderate everything themselves.
That’s the real crux of the issue.
In these smaller communities people also tend to upvote and downvote more responsibly. The system isn’t inherently a problem if the users can control their emotions and understand their role. On reddit, there was 0 chance of that. Here, maybe.