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 can see the value in that but in these smaller websites the more activity the better, and they already cut lemmy.world out 🫤
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.