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.
I doubt it. Downvotes are pretty much already useless. Maybe they’ll remove it from comments but I dont see them outright removing that option.
They can always just not tally down votes. Make the button subtract 1 from the displayed value when you click it, but not save it.