Maybe brainstorm as to what the actual implications of the dopamine hit/easy reward to downvote/suppress content is vs. simply having an upvote mechanism, and then share your thoughts and I'd be happy to get into a conversation with you. It doesn't sound like you've spent the time to actually extrapolate to the full consequences of the downvote mechanism.

Your response here though is one prime example as to why downvotes for most content types shouldn't exist. That you spent the tiny effort to click downvote to react to what you perceived as my "whining" - that that was a strong enough trigger or annoyance for you emotionally says more about your emotional regulation than the content of what I said, likewise by actually commenting you outed yourself or rather shared your actual qualitative reaction/response - so now there's an opportunity for a conversation, to broaden or enhance your understand or perhaps get educated by seeing things more from my perspective.

Don't you think having a qualitative response vs. a single quantitative digit changing to suppress content in an algorithm is more valuable to you, to society?

P.S. Upvoted you for commenting. Now maybe your comment won't be at the bottom, interesting how the "worst" or less valuable or lowest quality [qualitative] comments naturally make their way to the bottom - without requiring the downvote mechanism, isn't it?

P.P.S It'd be neat if HN/dang would offer a parallel view of posts, and then in the actual thread view, have 2 columns of comments - one not influenced by downvotes, and the other as the status quo - so people can start to experience and contrast; because AFAIK downvotes/upvotes aren't available in the API, so a third-party can't develop this? I'd certainly develop this system if HN's API could facilitate it.