Technology is a history of users using things in ways the developer didn’t consider. Honestly if it’s something that isn’t of value to the site, I’d imagine it should be on a report button, not a downvote button.
But you just can’t convince end-users to do things the way you want. Either the system let’s them do it or it doesn’t. And half the time if the system lets them do it, they’ll do it even if it sets fire to the system.
I don’t think it’s of any value to try to change user’s choice of using the system, but rather embrace it and find ways to both better enable the system to use it (and perhaps curb some things you don’t like about it) and then figure out what went wrong with the original intent and try to reimplement that.
Because once these centralized services reach the point of defacto, they always just trying to push more and more of what they want. We’re practically hitting a bubble at the moment of every social platform that took over trying to nickle and dime. It’s the reason for all of this in the first place.
Facebook - Well it was always crap.
Reddit - killed all the forums, now trying to own all the text as content, making lives harder for it’s moderators, and continuing not to pay them for the clearly thankless job. Quality of posts has degraded.
twitter - messed up the entire purpose of their checkbox, keeps trying to find various ways to make money, entire quality of platform quickly degrading due to server migration
Youtube - Has started pushing for more ads, and punishing users who don’t watch said ads.
People think about the short-term too easily, and then just kick and scream when it’s already too late, and moving requires a ton of coordinated work, and “putting up with”, making new things work, because everyone let the last thing get screwed over.
The constant cycle of letting products get ruined and moving on gets annoying after awhile.
It’s too easy to say “why not?” and very difficult to word “Because it always ends the same”