This wouldn't be necessary if they hadn't fucked up replies by turning blue checks into a de facto entry level advertising and vanity tier which resulted in the absolute worst replies ordered first.
I think one of the big things about downvotes is that it works better for a homogenous user base. Otherwise you can get in a situation where one group votes up and another votes down. It’s fairly obvious this happens on HN itself but the HN is FAR less diverse than the old Twitter user base, and has something more resembling a shared set of values.<p>With upvotes only, you can have a BLM community and a Proud Boys community and the negative interactions are replies, which Twitter interprets as positive interactions. With downvotes you have the prospect of entire communities downvoting each other. This will probably result in one or both communities leaving.<p>Social design is hard, is what I’m saying.
On all but the simplest of subjects upvotes and downvotes are nothing more than an indication of a post's popularity. There's no weight attached to a vote based on whether the voter has knowledge of the subject. With a complex topic it's pretty much meaningless for separating fact from fiction<p>They are VERY useful though if you're in advertising and want to know whether a message/opinon/subject/group/item is popular or unpopular with a target "market".<p>[I know you know all the above. I kind of wanted you to know that I know it too. Anyway, downvotes...]<p>Downvotes are massively useful in that they show what a group of people really dislike. That information is used to work out what the group don't want to see alongside of the "things" they do want to see.<p>Musk doesn't want censorship or fact-checking - it's irrelevant whether a message is fact or fiction, only whether it's popular or unpopular with a group. Flat-earthers buy things too.<p>X and YouTube etc are farming the users, the advertisers, the creators, and the employees, extracting as much from the interactions between them, and converting that into into wealth, all the while appearing to provide to each a service rather than being exposed as uncomfortably manipulative and exploitative.<p>Kind of beautiful in its efficiency, but quite terrible.<p>tl;dr? Downvote me, it's what they want :)