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 give core users of a community a chance to slow down low-relevance posts, and reposts, which might otherwise hit the main page and get upvoted by people who don’t really look at the community name. So, I like them for that reason. In other circumstances they’re a bit of a net neutral option compared to simply not upvoting.