From time to time I see grown up adults, who are apparently also well educated, protesting about the fact that shills are misusing the voting system to boycott their threads or videos by making them sink to the bottom as unpopular, while in the same time obvious bullshit becomes trending as popular. This happens often on Reddit and YouTube.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand how voting on social networks works. The 0 is neutral. When somebody gives +1 upvote, the 0 becomes negative. The negative -1 doesn't exist, because not only useless and irrational, but also harmful. This is why in real life the electorate is upvoting their candidate, not downvoting other candidates.

If you see a social network like Reddit or YouTube, where it is possible to give -1 downvotes, it's an obvious honeypot, where the shills can downvote maliciously any content that goes against the owner's agenda. Programmers are proficient in math, so this can't be a programming mistake, but a deliberately concieved system to stop users from exercising freedom of speech.

In short, if you see a social network like Reddit or YouTube, where -1 downvoting is enabled, don't even bother registering and posting there, because it's an obvious honeypot. Only social networks like Twitter or Facebook, where it is possible only to give +1 upvotes are programmed correctly, therefore you are aware of censorship, because they must block you directly.

P.S. I can't understand why an apparently normal site like Voat uses the -1 downvoting. I presume it happened because they trusted the Reddit's code so much, that they didn't bother to check if the voting system was corrupted.