Did you read the article? The title of this post is false.

The article doesn't say that. The title is false.

That claim is not on the article. Did anybody read it?

Have you ever used cheats on single player games when that was still a thing developers put in games? I did, it was fun. That's why.

I remember a similar case regarding Windows shipping with IE. Whatever happened with that?

But what’s the actual problem with the ability for posts to have negative scores?

It incentives self censorship that turns sites into echo chambers. e.g. Reddit

I like being able to say what I want without being banned by a power-tripping mod

There's currently nothing stopping a mod from creating a bot that deletes comments below certain threshold or that bans users for commenting on communities they don't approve like they did on Reddit. Only site policies can prevent that.

Lemmy only has the voting per individual post and comment, but doesn’t accumulate this as a sidewide score.

Lemmy does have a karma system. Here's yours.

In that case the only people that can answer the question are the engineers from those platforms.

Of all the formats you mentioned these are supported on popular platforms:

• Twitter: gif
• Discord: gif
• Mastodon: gif
• Reddit: gif, apng
• Tumblr: gif, webp
• Lemmy: gif, apng, webp

That's why gifs are still a thing.

The fact that GIF is still a thing in 2023 is baffling

As opposed to what widely supported animated image format?

no offense