I just don’t necessarily think the feature should be removed just because it isn’t always used as intended. I know there are folks who use it as a “disagree” button, and that’s… fine, I guess lol. I think Lemmy does a decent enough job of preventing abuse of the downvote button by removing the concept of karma. There are no imaginary internet points to be gained or lost. As a bonus, you can always turn vote values off entirely for yourself, as opposed to disabling downvotes on an instance. That way you can upvote/downvote organically, without your perception being skewed by existing votes.

I wouldn’t necessarily refuse to use a service based solely on whether it has a downvote feature or not, but I think downvote serves a different purpose than reporting. If I were on a platform that didn’t support downvotes, I do think I would feel obliged to be a lot more liberal with my upvotes, lol. Which… maybe that’s not a bad thing. 🤔

But again, through the power of federation we can both interact on a platform that can satisfy both our beliefs, and that’s a pretty awesome thing.