the.com/downvote
democracy's tiniest, pettiest guillotine.
means a click that quietly demotes a comment or post for being wrong, dumb, or just unwelcome.
from popularized by reddit's karma system in the mid-2000s, itself descended from slashdot's moderation points, built to let crowds sort signal from noise without a single editor in charge.
no explanation requiredyou never have to say why
hidden mathreddit fuzzes vote counts to stop bots gaming them
psychological stingstudies show downvotes provoke stronger reactions than upvotes reward
cascading effectone early downvote makes more downvotes likelier
for instance
reddit karma — the platform that made downvoting a public scoreboard since 2005
stack overflow — downvotes below negative threshold auto-hide answers
hacker news gray text — comments fade to gray as downvotes pile up