ericaI'm definitely somewhat intrigued by removing downvoting. The good content will still rise because it will get upvotes, and the haters will either comment to express being upset or do nothing at all. People are more likely to speak out when their emotions are stirred, so when there's a banger video or something funny you see so many positive comments, but forcing people to state their negative comments by it being their only way to do so could be interesting.
For example, there's an individual who downvotes pretty much everything in the news section that isn't a story or interview. Now are my feelings hurt when my story about record snowfall is downvoted? Not at all, but it certainly impacts the order of top content which is annoying.
Yeah I mean I was being a touch sarcasting with the "feelings hurt" comment - but what you're saying is exactly it. There's so few downvotes that actually get used properly, it would likely be far better for the person sitting there in angry silence at the piece of shit they feel needs to be punished if they had to contribute a comment to get their anger out.
As well, we've been running tests on the ranking system, and it seems like the math behind it checks out if we were to stop having downvotes to be tabulated.
It actually would work far better with downvotes if people used them properly, but so far the research is showing that it isn't being used in the fashion intended.
Its also kind of funny because the downvotes don't actually have nearly as much effect on the rankings as people think, but it really throws off trust of the system when you get one improperly used downvote and it *seems* like it threw off the ranking.