When I first found out it was an interesting concept that I was pretty neutral on but the more I engage/lurk with the community the more I enjoy it.
I generally don’t post/comment much on Reddit because I tend to be extremely sincere and that’s not always well received. Usually I don’t get much hate, but what I do get is a lot of non-interaction mixed with downvotes. And it’s just really discouraging when I’m just trying to share my thoughts.
But having no downvotes here is so nice because I’m not afraid that I’m going to get silenced into oblivion. Either people will actually engage with me (and maybe disagree, but in a meaningful way), or they’ll move on and not randomly share their disdain via downvoting.
It’s such a small change but makes a big difference. I bet a lot of people feel the same as me - it’s more comfortable to engage here.
Having only upvotes is still a bit of an echo chamber, but it’s moreso affected by how many people have seen the post (and in a related fashion, how early a comment was made in a thread), not whether people agree with the post. As someone mentioned, youtube’s dislike scenario is a good example of this in the real world. Downranking harmful/unhelpful videos is important for users on youtube, and it’s still useful on a platform like this. Without downvotes, if I came across a comment with 12 upvotes, I would have to mentally weigh how many people I think saw that post, and how many thought it was bad information.
I’ll note that I fully agree with almost all the points in favor of having no downvotes, but I think the utility of downvotes is just more important in my opinion.
Right there is inherent inertial momentum with upvotes.
I’m still on the fence, because understandably the potential (and actual) for abuse makes downvotes very unproductive as a feature, but there are also situations where they are very powerful.
It takes significantly more effort to refute a wrong position than it takes to make it. Downvotes serve as an explicit balancing point against that in ways that a well written response does not. Additionally, nested comments usually get less upvotes than their parent comments.
It is what it is I guess.