I was reading the rules of Beehaw.org and they opted to disable downvotes, and I see other instances doing the same.
The main reason is that often the downvote is used as “I don’t like it” instead of “This is not relevant to this community”; in the latter case, I think the “report” button is the correct action to perform.
What are your thoughts on this?
I think downvotes are important; they complement moderation and add a degree of QC. Furthermore, the possibility of occasional misuse is not a strong argument for taking away core functionality of the platform. If I didn’t want downvotes, I’d go on mastodon.