The down votes have had some positive influence on comment sections.

Remember the days when every comment section started with "First" and "In b4 ....". It served a purpose, maybe that purpose is no longer needed and behavior has changed for good.

Upvotes as well, it has reduced the number of quotes with nothing added but "Agreed" or "So much this!"

I don't think I support changes to the system at this moment. But, I definitely see that the way down voting is used on this site has changed substantially in the last few months. Generally speaking, there's just way more of it happening. It is not clear to me why.

Speaking as a "supporter", I'd say that removing perks should not be done without a lot of notice.  If you sell people on 2x, 3x, 4x voting power, you gotta give them that.  If you want to do away with it, maybe take it off the list of perks but keep it active for a year so that nobody that bought in gets the stuff they paid for removed in the middle of their subscription.

Also, how does it make sense to give 2/3/4x upvote ability, but not with downvotes?  Off the top of my head, I'd say remove both or neither. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I do make use of my 3x voting power both up and down.  I didn't use the downvote option very much until recently, but I definitely have increased my use of the feature in recent months.  I think that's mostly because it just feels like the way things are moving, so I've gone along for the ride.  It is almost like I feel like I have to do it, otherwise things are out of balance. Of course, I recognize that if I'm doing it, others probably are too, and that this puts us in a downward spiral.  Hopefully, I'm not a terrible abuser of the system.  I don't feel like I am.  

As I mentioned in a previous comment, I don't support changes *at this moment*, but I do understand that things are getting weird.  How about starting with a pinned post along the lines of "Stop weaponizing downvotes".

What about just stopping the hiding of comments for a while to see what that does? This idea seems to have a lot of support, in this thread at least. Frankly, other than a bit of a bruised ego (which really shouldn't be a problem for the vast majority of participants here that seem to be grown adults), the only negative that comes from down votes is making it harder to see the comments. So if you take that away, a good chunk of the problem is solved right there. Also, it probably removes some of the motivation to downvote stuff, which addresses the other part of the problem..

I feel like this would be a relatively easy, painless, and appropriate response. See what happens with that, and do something more if it seems necessary after a month or two.

As a comment gets more likes vs dislikes, it rises in the list, correct?

Just like too many dislikes vs likes and it goes down and potentially get's hidden?

Why not have the list always be made top down by first come first serve?

Not only does that force people to read through more than just the top few to get a proper feel, but it's easy enough to see the likes vs dislikes. 

That way you can leave both like and dislike alone, and refrain from hiding.

I don't see the point in overly propping something up or hiding it, other than maybe to reduce a really long string of comments here and there.

Well, people having money and having more voting power is like broken Governments,much like the US. So no surprise it's made it to small scale like these forums. It's complete horseshit but the world is corrupt.

My posts dont need upvotes to be funny, but i like knowing who my simps are

Edit: also league admins dont get shit outside vg$ made on predictions we're fine with that

Downvotes suck. Especially on mobile there's always an ad blocking the button to see the hidden comments so for a lot of articles I can't even view the downvoted comment since I mostly use VGC on my phone.

That'd be an improvement, but getting downvoted seemingly arbitrarily would still feel annoying without much real benefit. Having a lot of downvotes feels like 'this comment is terrible', when a lot of the time it really seems to mean 'this comment contains a view not liked by many, regardless of its quality'.

I don't know what kind of stuff you post in comments, but most of the stuff I post that gets downvoted gets posted for entirely different reasons. Mostly it feels either arbitrary (i.e. no obvious reason why it got downvoted) or it's obvious some people really dislike my opinion despite it being a reasonable one. Some comments that get downvoted are just stupid, but a lot of them are reasonable, or at least reasonable enough to not deserve downvote bombing.

We should go full Facebook and put reactions so everyone agrees that there is an implicit dislike button, but ultimately you can't be totally sure whether people intended to 'dislike' your comment because there isn't a nominal dislike button to begin with.

Happier faces, happier communities, more engagement, more profit. The end.