How many people downvote content they agree with or find funny but doesn’t add to the discussion?
Again, this is only a problem because we have lost this sense of shared culture. If we really want to have an established “community”, these guidelines will have to be one way or another be restored and enforced.
How many more complaints about downvote bullying are mods going to have to field?
Here is an idea: instead of trying to remove power from people, let’s give more of it. Hiding votes is hard, but creating a finer-grained permission system for moderation is not. Let’s build a system where mods can assign other mods for specific types of reports. Then, we can have few mods who would be “all powerful” like they are now and we could have a bunch of “issue-specific” trusted users who could access/triage specific reports.
We shouldn’t need mods to figure out what is “basic” spam and we shouldn’t need powerful mods to say “user A is reporting that B has downvoted their last 5 posts in different conversations. This is a violation of the community rules and therefore should be banned.”