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.
I think the more pessimistic view is that rather than removing downvoting entirely, they’ll just lie on the votes for select threads. This isn’t technologically difficult, nor does it need to be done manually. They could do something broad like making any admin flair post simply not count downvotes, guaranteeing it’ll have a “net positive” (or maybe averaging karma from nearby positive comments, to avoid it being suspicious when an admin replies to a +10k comment and only gets +500).
I see that as more devious because it’ll be hard to detect it’s happening and the fact that you can still downvote other comments would lead to disbelief that it’s what’s happening.
Reddit already fudges numbers although not to that extent. If you go to someone’s page from their profile and downvote all their comments it won’t actually count.
Exact upvotes and downvotes are also a little fluid, it’ll give you a number within a range but not an exact amount depending on the amount of interaction on a post.
This is not exactly true.
It’s not that the votes don’t count, it’s that Reddit uses a particular technique where the karma you see is randomly modified every time to make it impossible to see if your vote has an effect.
The goal is to prevent bots from realizing when they have been shadow banned.