content: Voat's new censorship Downvoating is what reddit uses to silence dissenting views.  People don't typically upvoat, even if they like something. They will just look at it. But when people get butthurt or see things they don't like they DO DOWNVOAT. You're assuming that people use both buttons the same way.  Voating is a censorship tool because it doesn't depend on rational argumentation. It only depends on CONSENSUS. That's why SRS use downvoat brigades because they know it's only purpose is to censor content they don't want seen by others. Look, our entire political system should make it more practical. We don't let everyone vote in elections for a good reason: we know that retards are the majority of people. You want Bill Gate's educated vote negated by some homeless retard on the street? That's EXACTLY what democratic voting does. That's exactly what the movie Idiocracy was about. When you give everyone an equal say, you negate the point of education. You negate the point of rational argumentation. If a baby can negate the vote of an adult, then you don't really need to learn how to think. All you need to do is make people agree with you. And bribery is the fastest way to agreement. Since people tend to downvoat when they're butthurt and engaged in censorship, the best way to combat censorship would be to only allow UPVOATING since people will actively have to champion what they believe rather than focus on what they want to complain about and censor. You can look at upvoating as positive censorship since it at least puts the burden on the upvoater to be accountable to their views and say what they prefer instead of simply complaining about what they don't want.  Stating what you want to happen takes EDUCATION AND EFFORT. Complaining about what you don't want just requires the ability to be butthurt.  I'd rather err on the side of positive censorship if we have to censor at all. We already know how negative censorship turns out: it becomes reddit. At least positive censorship requires EFFORT that keyboard warriors aren't willing to invest. So if we want to make this place different from reddit, we should ONLY have an upvoat button. And while we're at it, let's remove the scores from the profiles so keyboard warriors who are already socially retarded don't start jerking off to their fake internet power.