LPT: disable "Show Scores" in your settings. Score is useless, is often lazily used just to silence unpopular opinions and reduces engagement and reasoned arguments.
Exactly. Without it, we'll have the same problem that YouTube has without dislikes, where a video with a hundred likes and a thousand dislikes appears as a generally liked video...
downvotes - you click the downvote button, and then specify a reason from a list (disagreeable, unfunny, inaccurate, off-topic, rude, disingenuous, etc.)
So it's a bit like Slashdot, but only for negative reactions.
Each "reason" would be a dimension, as now you can measure content by funniness, accuracy, etc. And one of the effects of this system is that, if you are being downvoted, you'll have a better grasp on why. It's considerably more useful as feedback, for users in good faith.
(It has a few additional advantages too; for example custom sorting filters, and the very fact that a downvote takes a tiiiny bit more effort than an upvote should encourage positive feedback over negative one.)
Don't worry about it. Many heavily downvoted posts are also clearly in violation of either the community or instance rules; e.g. non-news posts in a news forum, or bigoted posts on instances that don't permit that.
Well, in my personal experience people become emotional and downvote you about trivial comment that don't break any rule.
For instance, I was recently donwoted to hell for saying that I despise Mozilla and prefer to use Brave instead of Firefox. 🤷♂️
Mozilla followers are like a cult members. Mozilla has done a lot of good, but it's far from perfect, but some people just refuse to accept any negative comments about it.