If you look at hacker news however, a lot of nonsense makes it to the front page. One word titles, clickbait, old links to wikipedia articles, submarine advertising, something no one has heard of announcing a new version, something few care about announcing they are shutting down, a point release of rust, a program that is only relevant because it was written in a certain language, pointless, trivial side projects that only seem relevant to people unaware of the the same idea being done before, etc.

I think a lot of that wouldn't make up such a giant part of the site if there were downvotes on stories.