Lemmy

Well there are multiple sides to this. There isn't a single it's good or bad.

Reddit got very popular, and the upvote/down vote was a part of it.

A very useful thing of this feature, is the ability to hide trash and get good content more views.

However the community isn't perfect, and some types of content can win over others, and often that winning content isn't useful, as it's just jokes or "funny" content.

If you were to sort by controversial in the reddit comments, and communities, you'll often find trash and useless content. Comments or posts alike. However it's. Not always the case, and sometimes legitimate content just gets down voted because people did not understand it or were just against that opinion.

In my opinion, if reddit were to remove the impact of the up votes/down votes and just put things as random, the content would be horrible with trash everywhere. But the little accounts may have a bit more chance to get up votes.