I believe that was the rationale for disabling downvotes. Honestly, it was pretty nice. Really, only rule-breaking content should be downvoted in my opinion. But everyone just uses it as a “don’t like” signal, which further marginalizes small/niche posters and communities that aren’t breaking any rules, by suppressing their posts with negative ratios.
I’m sorry. Recently laid off myself and management avoided directly saying AI was the reason, but other statements (C-suite talking about whether AI can do other work months before the layoffs, in front of me) convince me that was the reasoning.
The alternative prediction is that this is in fact sustainable and AI companies will in fact have revenue to keep the bubble inflated for a lot longer, just in the worst way - by extracting the value of human-created reliability and trust from the market:
CEOs have also bought into AI almost to a person, and are using it to replace workers, results be damned. AI can’t do the things they believe it can, but to them, if they can fake satisfying a need with AI for $5, that is preferable to actually satisfying a need with a real employee for $10.
The CEO is happy because his company saved $5 and he’s met his stock option incentive target, the AI companies are happy to pocket that $5 instead of the employee getting $10. Maybe they even raise the customer’s price to $12 as AI rent-seeking starts rising, and both companies get $6 each. Win-win, life will go on, just worse for everyone else.
PC costs certainly aren’t helping, but there’s an entire cross-section of income and age demographics whose only computing device is and has always only been their phones.
I was curious so I looked it up. This site suggests 1 in 7 households in the US “either lack a computer at home or rely solely on a smartphone for internet access”, heavily weighted to lower-income states like Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas and Louisiana: https://www.benton.org/blog/computer-ownership-and-digital-divide
Yeah, my opinion is rule-breaking should be reported. I’ll correct myself: The phrase I should have used is “bad-faith conduct.” Sealioning, LLM-likely text, propaganda posts, troll comments. Things that may not break rules but still are outside the bounds of respectful or legitimate effort.
If people want to use it to express general disapproval, the result will be a reddit-like leveling of commentary and opinion, because the bell curve of opinion will keep narrowing to just the most statistically acceptable content.
But if you insist on using downvotes for just “disapproval,” I’d at least suggest doing it asymmetrically: upvote if you liked a thing at all; downvote only if you absolutely hate it.