Really loving the new experiences here on Lemmy.one. But I’m seeing many subs with off-topic posts. Community downvotes will help overworked mods find and remove such posts. I understand no one likes to be downvoted but it’s a necessary tool for our community and only helps users understand and refine what and where they are to be posting their content.
It’s a question of time and effort to obtain that information. Without downvotes, you’d need to read each comment, categorize it as positive or negative, and then add them up yourself. With potentially thousands of comments in potentially multiple languages, that would be very impractical (if not impossible) to do.
You could probably save a lot of time by setting an absolute acceptable threshold (i.e. “if this has at least 8 negative comments”), but the entire practice is unnecessary considering that there’s a native function to do all of that.