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.
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.