There was a time when Reddit showed not just the sum of upvotes and downvotes, but the counts of both. The best comments were always the ones with hundreds of both up and down.
Then they hid that, and you needed to use RES to resurrect the downvotes. Then they removed the separate downvote count entirely, replacing it with the controversial tag. Problem is that the flag didn’t differentiate between 5/3 (+2) and 5000/4998 (+2).
That was the end of Reddiquette, and the beginning of Reddit’s decline into mediocrity.