I know downvotes aren't coming back, and this post isn't arguing for them to return. Rather, it's pointing out a pretty big unintended consequence of their removal.

Today, this post got to the top of Active sort with 64 upvotes and 230+ comments. Judging by the heated argument in the comments and the upvote disparity between those who agree with OP and those who disagree with OP, I think it's a pretty safe assumption that if downvotes hadn't been removed, this post would have gotten a lot of downvotes.

I don't know how exactly the Active sort algorithm works, but my best guess is that even though downvotes have been removed, the algorithm still tries to factor downvotes into how high up on the page a post should appear. With downvotes removed, every post looks like it has only ever gotten upvotes.

Of course, number of comments factor in too, so the effect is that if a post is controversial and attracts a lot of arguments, that post is favored highly in the algorithm even if it hasn't gotten a lot of upvotes -- there are no downvotes to push these controversial threads down. This higher visibility attracts more controversy and more arguing, leading to more shit-flinging and dogpiling in the comments.

So, TL;DR: Without downvotes, the current Active sort ends up acting like CONTROVERSIAL SORT. I know there's a reason why controversial sort was never added to this site -- it promotes the exact kind of Reddit-brained debatebroism that this site is trying to avoid, and this type of behavior is on full display from both sides of the shit-flinging in the thread I linked.

This algorithm needs to be fixed.