But without down-votes you end up with silly facebook and 9gag content. If you stoically see downvotes it should not alter your mood. You are the master of your mood, not the random people that dislike your comment, or weather or politics. Imagine a large feed straight with news, and all get only upvotes - general population will upvote cats instead of any actual news. There is no way how to combat low quality content if you have option only to upvote. It does not work in /r/all, but downvotes are very crucial part of every smaller subreddit.
Reddit has these problems, and Reddit has downvotes a-plenty. The audience is what determines whether oyu end up with silly facebook and 9gag content, and the bigger the audience, the lower the common denominator. We have a small feed and all we have are upvotes. I haven't seen a single image post yet (and let's keep it that way). I think kleinbl00 hit the nail on the head with this comment; it's the size of the community and the "max" upvote threshold that prevent low-quality, low-effort content from rising to the top.silly facebook and 9gag content
This study was addressing comments rather than posts, and suggested that comments are adversely affected by downvotes. That said, I'd argue that its very easy to get a similar sort of posts based on upvotes alone compared to upvotes and downvotes. Reddit doesn't seem to demonstrate that downvotes work in general against specific types of content, but are in fact subreddit specific. As a result, the signal of total upvotes and the signal of upvotes + downvotes will be similar. However, this study demonstrated that this is not true for the majority of people. In the end, it is not what ought to be which determines the content, but what is.But without down-votes you end up with silly facebook and 9gag content.
If you stoically see downvotes it should not alter your mood. You are the master of your mood, not the random people that dislike your comment, or weather or politics.