Downvotes hide comments or push them to the bottom of a thread where people are less likely to see that specific input. It's not about downvotes hurting peoples feelings, it's about how and what information is being controlled by the community. Depending on how it's done, that can create echo chambers where new ideas are not being integrated. That is a toxic community. The end result: people with minority opinions leave (less diversity and less critical assessment of the sub), fewer people join the sub due to a hard line centralized theme (less appealing to everybody else in the world who doesn't match the exact narrative) and ultimately the sub looses it's relevance (or accuracy/validity...w/e you want to call it) because lack of new content prevents the sub from staying up-to-date.

My big case here would be this sub and climate change. Clearly climate change represents some type of risk to be understood. Yet people will downvote that input or disregard it entirely (sometimes, not all the time). Well...if climate change is a potential risk, we need to assess whether or not it is pertinent to consider when prepping; but what if we can't even get out of the gate about understanding its risk? The question would be: does this sub have sufficient grounding in reality to remain a valuable place to seek information? Caveat: my case here is climate change, but really EVERY discussion would have this core concept at it's root. "Is the content and input valuable and relevant enough to warrant further participation?"

Downvotes and upvotes are not here to express agreement or disagreement (in my opinion), that's what comments are for. Downvotes are here to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to what is and isn't relevant.