After 20 years of living with it, I’ve decided I don’t like the downvote. The upvote is fine.

Reddit’s founders, early on tried to encourage people to treat the downvote as moderation. It was meant to mean that a thing doesn’t belong on reddit and people shouldn’t see it. Of course that quickly became mere dislike or disagreement.

I’d prefer an approach that requires some input about what’s wrong with a post in order to reduce its prominence; a restricted list of options as in Slashdot’s moderation would be sufficient, I think. I’m not sure whether this should necessarily require also making a report to a more powerful admin/moderator, but I lean toward making that optional in most communities.