My problem with downvotes is that people are using downvotes to downvote that things they don’t like.
I have observed people heavily downvoting the following things:
- SPH
- Humiliation
- Cocks/gay
- Cuckold content
- Male gonewild posters
- Celebs
- OC posters that are not a perfect 10/10
- Niche fetishes
This leads to
- People not wanting to post things
- People who do like those things not discovering those things in hot/top
- Less activity on the site overall because of decreased morale of posters especially OC posters
This is why I am in favor of disallowing downvotes.
Having upvotes is enough to determine which is “good” or “great” or even “bad” content in a community. Because the upvote count relative to other posts in the community tells how it was perceived by the community.
Having a more “targeted” home page may help people find things that they like instead of an endless stream of a big jumble of random content.
Reddit doesn’t have this problem because no one browses the entirety of NSFW content by new instead there is an “all” but even that had NSFW content removed from it. So really people are browsing only by the things they have subscribed to meaning if someone were to downvote a post they don’t like they would have to go out of their way to see it.
Downvotes should be reserved for things like spam, links that lead to malware, posts that are off-topic, etc. Things that mods would normally remove.