Well said. I knew that something like this would happen eventually. I’m actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner tbh.

I just hope that proper warnings will be given to people in the future (rather than the banhammer being used as a first resort) and that this doesn’t have too much of a chilling effect on expression going forward. I consider myself a pretty open-minded fellow, but even I have my limits.

I understand the sentiment of trying to build a more positive oriented community by getting rid of something like downvotes. However, that feels almost exactly like what Youtube did in removing dislikes on their site, which was widely unpopular. It’s a great indicator of spam or other undesirable content and removing it altogether might be doing more harm than good.

Plus, if filtering becomes a thing, being able to, for example, ignore posts with less than 5 upvotes would do wonders for some browsing once the site gains more traffic.

That said, I will always advocate for options. If that became a setting in a menu somewhere, I think that could be the best of both worlds.