You can't compare upvote numbers (or even upvote/downvote ratios) meaningfully between sites, because their communities aren't the same. Your proposed scenario tells us nothing beyond pure numbers -- 100 people voted on one, 10 on the other. You can't say anything comparative. You certainly can't speak to strength of intent.
Relationship is a euphemism for demographic data, and it's a fact that this is the direction that most online advertising is going. Advertisers want access to as many axes of demographic data as possible, and to target narrowly across them. What the article author doesn't realize is that the subreddit system already does that, without giving up any demographic data. You can target any interest, no matter how narrow.
> the way i would generate revenue would be to hold the successful ads hostage. Shadow ban advertisers accounts if they don't play ball. Literally remove viral commercials, but do it quietly.
Playing whack-a-mole with YouTube/imgur/etc. rehosts of a constantly growing list of content is a losing proposition.
There's nothing disorderly or actively harmful about that comment. It just adds little value compared to the search space of all possible comments. So it seems semantically more sound to simply withhold upvotes from it, rather than punishing it with downvotes.
> "We’re not monetizing to the full extent that we could," said Ms. Pao, who made headlines two years ago when she sued Kleiner Perkins in a sexual harassment case.
She certainly monetizes to the full extent that she can.
A well-organized hate group can use downvotes to silence reasonable discourse and trumpet their ideology, so it looks like the popular opinion when it's nothing of the sort.
You see this happen on Reddit. A hate group called SRS does it. They've even been leaking onto Hacker News recently, with some of the same lines they regularly use.