By default, Lemmy allows downvotes globally. However, when a server disables downvoting, it is similar to using a feature that is usually reserved for enterprises and very small, non-federated communities.
If a user prefer to not see downvotes, they can disable it by his favourite client settings, but the rest of the community should not miss this functionality for the pleasure of few users.
Yes and no, I agree we need a better alternative to only downvotes but adding a reason to be able to downvote will only make the problem worse.
They are removed to protect the sensibilities of the users, so instead of seeing ambiguous 100 downvotes, now you’ll have 70 downvotes with messages that might go from no or ew to horrible insults I’m not going to type here, if it was hurtful or discouraging before, it would get worse.
Sadly I don’t have the creativity to come up with a better way, the only alternative being to move to a forum where they can control as they please and categorise everything until the fediverse (or Lemmy at least) has the tools to give them their safe space.
I am not proposing that you’d need to write down why you’re downvoting the content, but that you’d pick an option. As such, the ability to say “ew” or hurl an insult would be zero.
And the goal here is not just “to protect sensibilities”, but to force the downvoter to provide at least some feedback. Because a lot of what makes the current system feel awful is that downvotes are interpreted as “this is bad”, but nobody can be arsed to tell you “why” it’s bad, in a way that you could fix.