I've been hearing people complain that "downvoting was so much better back in the day!" for as long as I can remember, on pretty much
any site with downvotes. For example you can find comments from more than 10 years ago in [1]; e.g. from 2011:
"Glad to see the downvote-disagree is becoming ever more prevalent!"[2]
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2]: >>2403589