this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2023
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I can get behind this, because upvotes/downvote serve a purpose of telling the website "more people should see this". But we don't need to know what needs to be seen less. Upvotes will, on their own, already tell us what's the top content and sort things out things. Late, Average and Middling posts aren't really going to be seen by most people and are fine with a lesser rating accuracy.
But what about de-constructive comments? What if something TRULY deserves to be seen less? Well, here's a stance I don't particularly believe everyone would get behind but has some merit: People should post their reasoning why their post was not very good as a response. As that not just generates discussion points, but also informs other onlookers of their rationale. And if a response gathers upvotes (ratio'd), then that signals a better message than a simple downvote ever would. Yeah, that means the only response to a troll is actually responding, and that may make a community appear less welcoming, but overall I don't know if that's a big issue in practice.
This is why I'm personally not a fan of removing downvotes. No one really has been able to answer why upvotes need no comment to back them up, but downvotes for some reason always need a justification.
Many trolling comments, or some comments we just disagree staunchly with, should be downvoted, and no one should be required to write an explanation for that.
The other reason, is that all the big tech companies (except for reddit), have removed the dislike button. To me that signals that they don't want it to be known that some positions are wildly unpopular.
On twitter the only indicator of "dislike" now, is being "ratio'd": having more comments than favorites, which of course they prefer because it drives up engagement, since no one can just downvote and move on. It also makes some reactionary positions (like being anti-trans for instance), seem much more popular than they really are.
I do understand and agree with the rest of the post. By all means, downvotes do have value with dealing with immature or agenda'd posters if that is problematic to a community.
But I did state why it can be fine and how there's a reason why upvotes require no reasoning while downvotes do - they have an immediate, positive effect on the usability of the site (everyone sees top posts), while downvotes have a less immediate one (only a subset scrolls to see bottom posts). Upvotes are just inherently more valuable to the community on the whole and shouldn't be put to equal questioning. Downvotes are more useful to contain undesirables.
On this note, there's somewhat of a tangential discussion to all of this, which is "should posts that go below a threshold (like -10 points) be hidden from users by default?". I personally would opt to keep posts visible to myself, because I want to know what was said that earned the shunning. But I can't think of a reason why a system that has downvotes shouldn't do that filtering, after all, it basically empowers downvotes to do their job better, and stops trolls from latching to top posts.
What you say about upvotes vs downvotes flies against how hierarchy inherently works. If you push something upward everything else moves downward relative to that. If you push something downward everything else moves upward relative to it.