All downvoting does is enforce 'crowd-think'. You could never picture it today, but back in 2012, /r/politics was much more central then it was today (still left leaning, but you could actually find differing opinions). But soon after that election, anyone who disagreed would get downvoted into oblivion, and eventually those people stop posting. And what you're left with is today's /r/politics.

You can see this in a lot of topic related subreddits, if something is extremely popular, you'll get downvoted for calling out any faults. Eventually people just stop posting.

Indeed. Downvoting simply shouldn't exist. It lets users feel like "mini-censors" and it turns out people really like censoring views they don't agree with or that make them uncomfortable.

It's not just downvoting, though. Reddit also lets the moderators act like real censors and they are completely unaccountable. There is no way to visit a subreddit and know whether the discussion there is censored or not. So you have to assume it is.

That happens with large enough communities everywhere, since the dawn of the internet. Eventually users move to smaller subs where there's more quality discussion

Weirdly enough, I just downvoted you because I disagree. Not sure what to deduce from that.

That people carry the toxic "make this post go away because I don't like it" mindset everywhere, even when they're explicitly asked not to?

At this point, the only reason I still hold a (read only) Reddit account is so I can turn implicit censorship like thresholding and front page blocks off. HN, unlike reddit, still has value as a discussion medium, but I wish that "showdead" didn't make the posts unreadable.

>HN, unlike reddit, still has value as a discussion medium, but I wish that "showdead" didn't make the posts unreadable.

Here you go: https://openuserjs.org/scripts/kennethrapp/Hacker_News_Text_...

I was doing something similar:

  var downvoted = document.querySelectorAll('.comment > span:not(.c00)');
  for(let i = 0, c = downvoted.length; i < c; i++)
  {
    downvoted[i].style.color = '#70798C';
  }

You can deduce that this is terrible for discussion too.