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.

  • John_Shepard@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    It’s only a matter of time, and tbh, the downvote is seldom used correctly anyway (not for showing disagreement, for example). Some subs already hide the downvote button, but you can still downvote using shortcut keys (Z), at least on old.reddit using RES.