Well, isn't this a product of the engagement-/advertisement-/"likes"-driven society online we've moved towards or incentivized thanks to technology? It doesn't

Well, isn't this a product of the engagement-/advertisement-/"likes"-driven society online we've moved towards or incentivized thanks to technology? It doesn't matter that something was downvoted as useless or just plain factually incorrect by a certain number of people. If enough other people found it worth upvoting as entertaining or feel-good enough for the couple minutes of their time, that's more important to the ranking. We just care about generating more views and traffic. Negative sentiment doesn't help traffic, only positive does. No bad vibes allowed. Pointing out factual incorrectness, dishonesty, or logical fallacies, etc. isn't important. No one got rich doing that. On a more serious note... Any site that has eliminated the downvote count (presumably as it's not "informative" as to how much that content should be presented) and discarding legitimate information about whether that content is good or not, indicates to me that the site isn't worthy of a lot of respect as an arbiter of intellectually honest information. Then again... if I'm relying on a dumb up/down vote count by the popular masses, how deep can that be as a measure of something's intellectual value?