Downvoting has been disabled on this subreddit for some time now. I wasn't the one who personally did it, but it was something that I supported. The thinking at the time was that downvoting can often hurt people's feelings, and for people who are already feeling vulnerable and rejected, that can be particularly damaging.

However, as many - if not most - of you know, this can be quite easily subverted with a single click. It also has no effect on people who are using mobile apps, which is a rapidly growing portion of our community. As a result, comments and submissions are regularly downvoted here. You would never know that downvoting was disabled if you looked at the front page or read through the comments.

So, my thinking is this: I believe strongly in the democratic nature of Reddit. While it makes sense to me to disable downvoting, it seems unfair to prevent some people from downvoting but not others. The people who maliciously downvote comments and submissions continue to do so regardless of what we do, so I think it makes the most sense to give everyone the ability to downvote in the interest of keeping things fair.

Now, that wouldn't mean that we're encouraging downvoting. We would still have the policy that downvotes should only be used for submissions or comments that are not in-line with the rules in the sidebar. Downvoting is not a way to express disagreement, and it's not warranted when you simply "don't like" something. I personally don't think there will be any noticeable change in the downvotes around here, because they already seem to flow just as freely as the upvotes. However, it will be more fair, and I think that's important in this community.

So, what do people think about this?