I have been lingering here and on /r/the_donald for a long time. I google this site a lot, just to see if they are getting fair treatment SEO wise. I believe this key time deranking is a coordinated effort to get the masses to ACCEPT the disappearance of the subreddit. Instead of flocking here, they want the people to get detached from the community. By "they" I am referring to Google, Reddit, and Twitter.
When this website began to gain traction, Reddit removed their noindex for the donald subreddit in response. They wanted to modify the mod team and gain control of the narrative. Now that the sub is banned, this site should be number 1 when you Google "the donald" but instead you have a lot of liberal media like the verge writing news articles about the ban, where the reasons are polished and set forth in a consistent way in all the articles. This is a key time for this site to gain users in a more uncensored place imo. We must all do our part to circumvent the "protections" aka filters, that Reddit put into place to halt the user migration. Saying (dot) doesn't work anymore so we need to constantly post new methods, that will likely work for an hour or less. This is a key time.
By the by, I am a libertarian, so I don't agree completely with this community's politics. I just holistically support the free exchange of ideas, with no exception. A lot of people dub this community as racist, violent, etc, but I almost never see that stuff and I spend quite a bit of time lingering. Meanwhile, toxic subreddits are allowed to not sensor users who literally advocate real violence against police! If it was a conservative movement to participate in the current riots, supporting the riots would be banned everywhere! Or at least it would be algorithmically squashed, which is essentially the same thing. They would treat us like terrorists if we were rioting at the same level right now.
Sorry, I got a little off track there. I just wanted to say that the free exchange of ideas is extremely important to me idealistically. It doesn't MATTER if I agree or disagree with you. I never see the right trying to sensor the left, I always see it the other way around. Sure, we will storm a subreddit or leave one star reviews for a book etc, but in memory I can't remember a single thing that we have demanded be DELETED from existence. We just mock ideas we don't like, like people should in the free exchange of ideas.
In the wake of what happened today, I decided to migrate over here. I was just curious what the reasoning is behind only having an upvote option for posts. I think part of sending the best posts to the top is the downvote and upvote system. I'm sure this is done intentionally and with good reason, but I cant imagine that I'm the only one with this question. I tried searching for this before posting as well.