Mods are aware of the Downvote issue, are doing nothing about it
(communities.win)
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Not necessarily nefarious though.
Back in the day votes would get queued up and it'd take minutes or hours for your vote to register on refreshed page so the system is probably a huge mess of jeetcode.
Could just be their downvote database filled up once there was an issue where half the users were mass downvoting the other half, and they don't know how to fix it.
That might explain why new downvotes aren't showing, but not why all downvotes have disappeared, for comments that are years old.
To illustrate my point: https://communities.win/u/DomitiusOfMassilia?type=comment&sort=controversial
Those comments should all negative scores, yet now they all have a score of 1.
Actually it completely explains why all the downvotes disappeared.
Database is corrupted or otherwise won't open, system can't display any downvotes on any comment.
Neatly explains everything even the lack of communication; like they're going to come out and say "uh thing broken we tarded".
But why only the downvotes? It's possible but it seems like a huge coincidence that upvotes work while downvotes are broken considering they're almost certainly part of the same function amd tables.
It might seem that way, but with a system like this a primary concern is keeping all the page rendering data in memory so it's fast.
So what's used to render a page won't be stored in a massive all-vote database where they do a query counting all the down/up votes each time, but something that processes incoming up/down votes and applies them to a per-post cache or a highly compressed structure that fits in memory.
For example last I heard the entirety of Hacker News is in RAM on one server. Scored probably not designed by phd computer scientists so I bet it takes 100x more resources than HN.
When the voting was backlogged back in the day they probably did something like put vote handling on a separate server or added processing steps to make it fit in RAM. Maybe downvotes are on a separate server that crashed, or they had a bot-detection step on downvotes that crashed the whole pipeline, or it could be lots of things like that.
...or they could have just turned them off because of Iran war being unpopular. I'm just saying having a system failure is a plausible explanation for all downvotes disappearing.