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Yeah, I’m really loving the downvote feature being gone. I’ve been on another forum that had a noticeable decrease in toxicity when they removed their dislike reaction too.

Yup.

I've seen it used quite effectively as a way to supress discussion, actually.

In the France subreddi, which I was quite active in, as I'm French, if you sorted by controversial, you would often find Queer related topics. Especially Trans issues related threads. Just downvoted to oblivion. But, It's not like people were disagreeing or anything, all of the few comments on there were positive. It was just a really effective way to suppress discussions about those topics.

As most people sorted by Best, all it would take was a couple of initial downvotes on your thread to bury it for the vast majority of people.

And it worked. Every so often, I would check what was in controversial that day, or that week. Without fail, I would see some of those topics on there, topics which were rarely discussed in this sub, because it was actively being suppressed by the downvotes.

Once I noticed this pattern, I began to check some subreddits, and I noticed the same thing happening on a bunch of them. Often, targeting the same subjects.

Voting is also public, so when people do use them they need to be prepared to stand by it a opposed to using it with anonymity.