One of the major design decisions was to have no downvotes, which was justified as a way to created "civilized discourse", the idea being that people should discuss their disagreements, resulting in "civilized discourse".
I predicted this wouldn't work because people sometimes have a very strong desire to express displeasure, and if they can't do it by downvoting, they'll do it by writing nasty comments. You don't even have to have used the internet to guess this, e.g.,
@ed709062 Yes the underlying ideology of Discourse is terrible. You can strip that stuff out to a certain extent but it still drove these kinds of design decisions
if you watch someone who's road raging, they often try to get the attention of their target and they keep getting angrier and angrier and angrier when their target doesn't notice they're being given the finger or whatever.
If you ever watched a forum migrate to discourse, you can see this exact thing play out. I read the blizzard forums around when I played Overwatch for https://danluu.com/overwatch-gender/ and it was exactly as you'd expect. The number of mean/toxic/jerk-y messages went way up.
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