The data doesn't surprise me. Downvotes feel bad. There is a special kind of frustration that you get after composing a response, and coming back to see -2: WTF is that?! -2? Minus two what? Did the OP downvote me or was it someone else? Two people? Wait, -3 now? Are people just piling on? Did I say something that this community as a whole doesn't like? They make you guarded and defensive, and that alters your mood. After being downvoted, I have found myself away from the keyboard, minutes later, still feeling slighted. They definitely alter my approach to commenting. From a functional perspective, not only can you sort without downvotes, their presence increases the variables in the sort, which makes sorting for one signal more difficult. A downvote is not the opposite of an upvote. Also, what would be the equivalent of a downvote in a face-to-face conversation? I imagine an upvote might be someone saying 'good point'. But people don't say 'bad point'. Disapproval without explanation is not the converse of approval without explanation.
>Disapproval without explanation is not the converse of approval without explanation. So maybe have "ignores" on your user page, or perhaps some other thing like that a way to "downvote"? I do like the concept of a downvote, the idea that the community can decide what things are definitely bad and should be hidden away. However, I think it needs to be a system that is less a downvote and more a report system. Perhaps add a "requirement" to downvote that displays your name in a comment where you explain what you did. Leave the comment blank and you will similarly be disliked because you just attacked a person with zero explanation. So a comment highlighted in blue is one which represents that the user also committed to a "I want this to be hidden" report. That way you know what is wrong and can go to improve. And have a way where if you up... node? dot? hub? attach? a comment that is a downvote, it adds your name to that comment and adds another downvote to the comment above it.