So you don’t think people who post hateful stuff about trans people or deliberately spread dangerous or hateful misinformation, or people who spam multiple comments at once should be banned from the platform (or at the very least have their comments actioned by mods)? I’m saying that because Reddit originally intended the Downvotes system to be used to combat those specific types of scenarios, they said it was to control spam and malicious actors. These are things that should be dealt with using disciplinary action i.e. being booted.
If it was an agree/disagree system like many people think it is they wouldn’t have added rate limiting to people with low or negative Karma or made it so communities can set karma restrictions. Even so I don’t really think it’s a good method either, it’s almost just a softer less obvious form of shadowban.