I think downvotes give core users of a community a chance to slow down low-relevance posts, and reposts, which might otherwise hit the main page and get upvoted by people who don't really look at the community name. So, I like them for that reason. In other circumstances they're a bit of a net neutral option compared to simply not upvoting.

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.

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.

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

I like this idea as well. Ultimately, it seems like upvotes would hold more weight this way?

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