I think downvotes do make sense in the case of plagiarism, (real) spam, and in the case of incitement to criminal offences and other justiciable content.
Instead, I observe far too often how the law of the jungle is simply exercised to 'punish' users because of their unpopular opinion, antipathy or pure arbitrariness and, moreover, to silence them forever from the moment of escalation with automated(!) flags of each of their posts.
When I look at some of the circle vote groups here, whose members churn out cheap '0815 posts' on a daily basis reaching 'reputations' of more than 80 by doing so, and then act as if the occasional self-votes by users with very little HIVE power would be the downfall of the platform, it seems very hypocritical.
And if a whale does nothing else than upvote his own comments (burn post or not) because there is allegedly not enough content worth rewarding from small users on HIVE, then that is an indictment of the extent to which manual curation has ultimately failed.
What also bothers me a lot is that the initial dialogue is rarely sought, friendly advice is rarely given, but instead, usually without warning, the trump card of higher HIVE power is smugly played out.
If there was a friendlier atmosphere on HIVE - especially from the major stakeholders - that signalled to new users "We want to help you find your way on HIVE, you are allowed to make mistakes, as long as you are willing to learn from them, we will support you (and besides, we don't always get everything right either)!", I would be way more positive about the future of the platform.
I like the idea of a warning system before giving out downvotes, would make the system a bit more friendly, but after so many years I now think downvotes should be removed and illegal content should be dealt with at the front-end level, DV don't remove content. Instead of DV maybe a community note system like on X where users can vote on the community notes as well. It's really a dilemma.
Completely without downvotes, HIVE would have a disgusting farming ehm trending page like STEEM.
I personally am not against downvotes altogether, but there should be ways to restrict abuse and personal harassment.