It's the proliferation of downvoting. It disincentivizes speaking your honest opinion and artificially boosts mass-appeal ragebait.
It's detrimental to having organic conversations.
"But the trolls" they say.
In practice it's widely abused.
Using HN as an example, there are legitimate textbook opinions that will boost your comment to the top, and ones that will quickly sink to the bottom and often be flagged away for disagreement. Ignoring obvious spam which is noise, there is no correlation to "right" or "wrong".
That's one advantage old-school discussion forums and imageboards have. Everyone there and all comments therein are equally shit. No voting with the tribe to reinforce your opinion.
What's worse is social media allowed the mentally ill to congregate and reinforce their own insane opinions with plenty of upvotes, which reinforces their delusions as a form of positive feedback. When we wonder aloud how things have become more radicalized in the last 20 years — that's why. Why blame the users when you built the tools?
