Kevin
Reason unknown? Not entirely accurate, the reason was explained by both José and Jack a week ago...
Why are downvotes gone?
Regarding the game owners asking us before making changes... Why should they? How many games developers ask their players before introducing new features or removing unnecessary ones? Personally I think they should have removed upvotes at the same time but I'm not going to lose sleep over the fact they didn't.
As this is a personal opinion I won't post using my Mod account in case people misinterpret it as an official response.
In terms of being explained why, I hadn't seen that post so sorry about that
While I get your point about not many devs asking there players base about what they think, this decision surely makes little difference to the devs but more the players who read the forums so therefore they should be asking the people who use the downvote button rather than just removing it which, shock horror, people didn't like .....and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one that has this opinion