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.

I don’t agree. Downvotes might be not relevant and counter productive in general discussions, but in porn communities I think they’re critically important. If there’s no downvotes, spam bots or trolls will overtake communities. Mods can only get to things so fast.

Being downvoted on OC is pretty sad. A lack of upvotes is enough to signal disinterest.

Fantastic idea to put the load to decide about relevance to the mods instead of community solving it. /s

Removed by mod

I think things can still be relevant to a community and be disliked. At the moment this is mostly an art sharing community, but I saw some talk about creating subcommunities revolving around nsfw discussions and recommendations.

While I doubt downvoting would be used much, I can see it filtering out low effort content or show disagreeable ideas in discussion based communities. Because of that, I dont see an immediate reason to remove this feature.

I also like the idea of a community having slight self governance to take some of the burden off the mods.