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.
This possibly has already happened in 2016/2017. Popular r/The_Donald posts had their vote count set to zero (even while still being on the front page: https://archive.is/rfc22), and the highly-anticipated Donald Trump AMA was pushed to page 190 of r/all despite having tens of thousands of upvotes. Admins were saying that the voting algorithm was working as expected, and the posts were simply being downvoted by haters like r/EnoughTrumpSpam brigades after reaching r/all. Conveniently, since display of downvote counts was removed in 2014, this was impossible to verify. Admins clearly hated r/The_Donald and have made multiple changes to the front page algorithm just to make their posts show up less. It’s possible they were modifying the vote counts in the database directly, but there was no clear proof at the time.
Coincidentally, 2017 was the same year when u/spez/ did get caught modifying the database to edit users’ comments, and he only admitted to it because there was clear proof of that. The users he “pranked” were incidentally r/The_Donald posters.
More recently, Spez removed most of the downvotes on his recent AMA thread, and someone took a screenshot before it did it. If I remember correctly (not visiting Reddit to check), it went from being comparable to the infamous “sense of pride and accomplishment” comment to only having like 5 downvotes, and hundreds of people in the comments were calling him out on it.