The purpose of the downvote is for you to say what content wasted your time. Those who brought that content to you deserve to lose your attention so they do not

The purpose of the downvote is for you to say what content wasted your time. Those who brought that content to you deserve to lose your attention so they do not waste your time in the future, do they not? That's why LinkLonk decreases your connection to those who upvoted it. It also displays a popup saying "You will see less content from N users and M feeds that upvoted this" to explain how the downvote button works. LinkLonk also increases your "downvote connection" to other who downvoted that item as you are suggesting. A "downvote connection" is how much weight the other person's downvote has for you. That is, it captures how good their past downvotes were for you and how much their future can be trusted. So there are two kinds of connections: - Upvote connection - gives others ability to promote/curate good content for you. - Downvote connection - how much others can bury/moderate bad content. And as you are also suggesting, the connection is decreased over time without similar ratings. Each time someone you are connected to upvotes something your connection to them becomes slightly weaker. So if you ignore content from a user/RSS feed then it will have lower ranking for you over time. So in practice the downvote button should not be used much at all.