I agree that it doesn't necessarily always devolve into hate speech but, anecdotally, every community I've seen without heavy moderation eventually devolves into low effort meme posts, and sometimes hateful content. For example, r/gaming vs r/games. The pattern repeats itself all over reddit.

>The community gets to decide what’s popular

This is false. The piece of the machine that really decides is reddit's algorithm and how people consume content. It also doesn't take into account how communities can drastically change in an instant if a post gets brigaded. Suddenly it's not "your community" that's voting and deciding.

What happens is the most easily digestible content that appeals to the most people gets upvoted the most. Saying "the community decides" is at best naive.

What do you mean, "wouldn't"? This isn't a hypothetical, this is the reality of today. And yes, it is a current problem.

> that’s the whole point of upvotes and downvotes.

No it's not. In fact the reddit rules / guidelines specifically state that is not what upvotes and downvotes are for. It's specifically called out for the moderators to deal with it through user reports, not through votes.

Plus, lots of downvotes does nothing to remove hateful content. The content is still there! Only the moderators can remove hateful content.

Isn't it funny how reddit ended up the opposite of what it was seemingly designed as? A system with a community policing vote process turned into a community that is one of, if not the, most top down moderated spaces on the Internet. Where the voting system turned into a supplementary group control system rather than a liberator.