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I wasn’t a fan of Reddit’s downvote system. It was a pointless, vague way to show displeasure without actually providing any useful information. I never knew if a downvote was because I made a comment that was factually wrong, the reader had a differing opinion, or simply because I made a grammatical error. Plus, there’s brigading. By itself, a downvote doesn’t really tell you anything.

I’m sure that in at least some cases, a genuine discussion (rather than a simple downvote) would have been more thought-provoking for everyone.

One thing I definitely won't miss is being downvoted for just asking a question!

Yes, I hate downvotes and I think they do not contribute to anything other than anger.

I’d be annoyed for awhile then I’d remember most people used the downvote button as a dislike/disagree button, which isn’t what its meant to be used for.

The thing that bothered me was getting downvoted when it made absolutely no sense. When I made some book recommendations, for example.

And I'm pretty sure that in at least some cases, one or more people were following me around to downvote everything I wrote. That kind of petty malice is hard to understand.

I think it’s natural to have a stronger reaction to bad things more than good things. There’s something called Negativity Bias and it’s kinda why rage-baiting and (bad news) articles is so prevalent is because we inherently feel a stronger reaction to those than the positive counterparts

I like the idea of Downvotes. The principle was a good one but it neglected to consider that people, on the whole, don’t look at vote buttons as up vote = relevant content downvote = irrelevant (their original intention, essentially crowdsourcing moderation / content quality control). Rather they look at them as agree / disagree, like / dislike.

I’m the end I think they hurt the conversation. People can just downvote with ease instead of having to put the effort in the say something, leaving that space for those who had a strong enough drive to be snippy or nasty to full it.

Upvote only still allows a mark of quality / relevance from the community without making it so divisive.

Haha, -1 is the cruelest number. Much more negative than that and you can just blame the hivemind. But the fact that just a couple of people think you’re wrong makes you really want to start explaining why they’re wrong to downvote you.

What about a new rule that does let you downvote only if you comment underneath before?

I usually got down voted for opinions that I held on topics like cryptocurrency. There seems to be hivemind mentality about certain topics and going against the grain on reddit is not allowed. There has obviously been a lot of bullshit around that topic specifically, but I never took the downvotes personally, I just assumed people were being to dense to try and have a reasonable discussion.