Downvotes can be a useful tool to shape a community, the issue comes in when several people start downvoting communities they don't even participate in. Which is one of the main issues brought up here.

It may seem very clear to you that "no one" wants downvotes, but as an admin I get complaints for basically every decision made on this site, so what is the "right" choice is sometimes hard to determine. I've been getting complaints about downvotes being disabled for awhile now, so it wasn't clear to me. Even now, the opinion is still very split. Which is why I enabled them quietly to see if it would cause any issues. It did, so I made this post to see if people think the issues created by downvotes outweigh the benefits, and what peoples' other opinions about them are.

This is my opinion based on what I've read and the results of the poll: I think at a later time when lemmynsfw is larger, downvotes may be viable, especially if lemmy implements a custom home feed so that not everyone sees the same posts. This would help mitigate the issue of people not in communities downvoting posts. But as it stands, I'm leaning towards disabling them again. Frequent posters, which are kind of needed for this site to survive, don't seem to like them, and the poll is split almost 50/50. I have to try to balance enjoyability of posting and enjoyability of consuming content on the site, and it just seems like downvotes really hurts posters and only marginally helps consumers.

I'm leaving the poll up for a few more days and am going to continue to read the comments, but, if nothing changes, that's probably what's going to happen.