I've really soured on votes in recent years. They promised a sort of crowdsourced moderation and I appreciated the cleverness of the idea back around the time reddit first came out.

But now I think that downvotes have just kinda become a sort of digital tomato for people to throw, a means of burying a post without putting any thought into an argument as to why the post is illegitimate.

And that's the best case. In the worst case it's a really easy system for bots to game. You don't even need AI. All it takes is a bunch of accounts "legitimate" enough to not get flagged by whatever botting heuristics the site implemented and you can produce a false consensus.