Before I deleted my reddit account I was convinced that downvoting had more of an effect on what frontpaged on a subreddit than upvoting not in that the algorithms gave more weight to them but a few downvotes would cause an article to disappear quickly and not get more upvotes.

If you posted anything along the lines of "maybe Java has some good points" or "I am at least partially into programming for the money" you would get always get downvoted into oblivion on proggit for instance.