I love them. It’s really good for communities to have a way for people to express opposition other than posting a response, and even better when it results in those controversial comments being de-boosted. A lot of other social networks would be much better off if they allowed that sort of reaction from their users.

I think they are usually a good thing. Someone says something incorrect or mean they get downvoted. But like anything else they can be misused as well. I do remember getting downvoted for posts I couldn’t see anything wrong with, but life and people are like that and once I made peace with that fact I was fine with it.

In larger communities, valuable discussions are often overshadowed by low-quality content, such as pictures and memes, that receive high upvotes. This leads to meaningful discussions being rarely seen on platforms like Reddit unless users specifically search for controversial topics or delve deep into the content. Additionally, certain communities may exhibit a bias towards specific content, resulting in other content being buried and going unnoticed. This issue is particularly evident in the ‘gonewild’ subreddit, where all male pictures are buried due to the gender dynamic on Reddit. The main reason behind this is that downvoting is often used as a way to express personal dislike rather than as an indication of the content’s relevance to the community.

In my opinion, there should be a user setting that allows for displaying only upvotes, either on the front-end or back-end. Should this setting affect the ranking algorithms for the user (back-end) or simply show the number of upvotes instead of the total count to the user (front-end)?

Imo, in theory they’re great. In practice, in my experience with reddit, not so much.

You have a differing opinion? You usually get downvoted to hell and back. Without the downvote button, some people who would otherwise just downvote you and move on would have to engage you in a discussion. I think that’s a good thing.

Edit: there were rare times when a factually correct answer was downvoted as well which makes things confusing. It’s rare but it happens.

Yum tasty downvotes. Its only the internet, it can be very fickle.

I like the idea of 4 buttons up, down, left, right

name them good, bad, funny, useful.

The buttons should be either 'insightful ’ or ‘funny’

And those should be the only options you get.