I fully understand the issue with downvotes but they’re pretty well essential for the scoring system to work at all.
If I may demonstrate with an example, let’s say there are three images:
Image A has 40 upvotes and 2 downvotes
Image B has 40 upvotes and 20 downvotes
Image C has 40 upvotes and 200 downvotes
Now, without downvotes all three of these would have the same score, but each one has a VASTLY different reception, the upvotes alone don’t give the full picture.
Hell, controversy could get a picture more exposure and more votes in general, let’s say image X has 400 upvotes and 2 downvotes but image Y has 440 upvotes and 2000 downvotes. Image Y would have a HIGHER score even though it has a worse reception overall by virtue of just getting more attention.
Apologies if I waffled on too much about this, I just really wanted to make this point clear, particularly since it seems like someone wanted to make this point earlier and didn’t really get it across.