> When you censor an opinion by downvoting something, you are making an unfair decision for future viewers of that content who would rather make that decision on their own.

The value of the downvotes on HN, Reddit and YouTube is to save time when trying to find signal among the noise.

Still, I agree that some people may end up unfairly not being heard/seen.

But removing downvotes seem one step closer to surrendering to The Algortihm.

Then again, perhaps that is the general idea. And perhaps it will work out. YouTube can transparently use watch time instead of vote counts when deciding how to rank stuff. That’s what TikTok does, from what I understand. Maybe YouTube already does as wel. And in that sense, video content is a bit different from text.

So even though my initial impression of this change was negative, I think it may work out when we consider the difference between HN, Reddit on one side and video streaming services like YouTube and TikTok on the other side. (Also, I am aware that Reddit hosts videos too, but I am talking about the text and external link content here).