This is related to https://lemmy.world/post/13066509
IMO, one of the things that made Reddit deteriorate in quality was the cultural change in how to use votes. Early on, voting was meant as "this is interesting/not interesting for the community". It was only later (maybe around the time that Facebook got heavy into the algorithm recommendations based on reactions ) that voting on a post/comment started to mean "I like/dislike this" and "I want/do not want more of this".
What ended up happening is that contributed to the "filter bubble" effect. People started relying on voting as a way to customize their feeds.
None of this works with Lemmy, because we don't have (yet?) a good recommendation system or a client that can filter/sort the posts based on the user's voting history. So we are stuck with the worst of both worlds: people are downvoting things that do not help them to manage the content, and people from other "niche" communities are being met with downvotes just because their content is not appealing to the majority. Ask people from non-english speaking communities, and they will tell you that any post is immediately voted down by people who are not related at all with the community.
I still think there is value in the downvotes. When the person voting has already established some authority at the community where the post/comment is being made, a downvote is a good signal about the relevance of that post/comment to the rest of the community. For this reason, I don't think I'd remove down votes from my instances.
However, can we start working on a set of guidelines to help users understand when it is appropriate to vote in a post/comment?
Sort by new comments, hide the votes and go on with your life.