Or perhaps people just don’t like the kind of content that is being posted.
The issue is that if people don’t like that sort of content, they shouldn’t downvote it, they should filter it, so they don’t have to see that sort of content.
IMHO (this isn’t policy): Score/votes should, in a perfect world, to enable users who want to use score to judge the aggregate perceived (and this is unquestionably subjective) quality of an image, be a representative aggregate of votes from users who will judge the content on the actual quality of the image, not make judgements on the category or type of the image.
In other words, to give an example: if someone’s going around downvoting artwork because they don’t like the style an artist has gone with, or just think an image is a bit rubbish, that’s okay. If someone’s going around downvoting everything tagged anthro, that’s not okay.
This in my mind is the issue between systemic and selective downvotes. We’re cool with people downvoting selectively. We encourage people to not downvote from thumbnails because downvotes can be a quite powerful negative message to artists, and it doesn’t take long to really have a proper look before you decide to tell an artist their work is rubbish. This is not something that should surprise anyone; we’ve always tried to bias the site towards positivity when it comes to feedback. Heck, it’s in the rules (rule 0). Don’t be a dick by downvoting that pic of Twixie someone’s spent a day on just because you think Twishy is the OTP.
As for changes in future - there’s some small things I’d really like to implement like filter suggestions (You seem to downvote X quite a lot - did you know you can hide that sort of stuff from the site by clicking here to add it to your filter?) to make sure people are aware of filters and are encouraged to use them appropriately.
