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.

  • Archpawn@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year ago

    There’s subreddits that try to get rid of downvotes with CSS. I’m surprised they don’t make it an option for subreddits to fully get rid of it.

  • John_Shepard@kbin.social
    1·
    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.

  • kanervatar@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    I guess I’m a pussy but I’ve never been a big fan of the upvote-downvote system. It can be useful if someone comes in spouting some straight up nonsense, but people typically also downvote posts and comments that don’t have anything wrong with them for petty reasons. And I tend to feel hurt by that lmao

  • CoderKat@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Skray@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • lich_hegemon@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        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. It makes it easier to control automated vote manipulation since bots will just make a new account if they realize they’re banned.

    • TauZero
      1·
      1 year ago

      they’ll just lie on the votes for select threads

      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.

      • slicedcheesegremlin@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • Secus@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    They removed it years ago, sure the button is still there, but it’s essentially meaningless

  • psycrow@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    One thing i love about lemmy and kbin is that up votes and down votes are separate and visible. The only other semi successful reddit clone that did this was voat, and I’m glad that shithole site is dead. Rest in racist peices.

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Possibly. But some Lemmy instances actually do that and they have their reasons. Guess it does depend on what you want the social to be. On some discord is part of the culture, elsewhere it’s about showcasing and showing support.

    Or it can just be about showing a friendly rubber mask of a face spread over a soulless corporate shell, of course