At the beginning of my path in this world, the conception I had of negative votes was about punishing plagiarism or spam content, the truth was that those who taught me said that was the use.
Over time I got caught up in several situations for voting negative. I understood the use of downvote with respect to excessive rating, when I was involved in several dramas. Of course, it would be a lie not to say that it affected me at first, but then I understood the point of it all.
The point is that most people do not sit down and study the economics and philosophy of our platform conscientiously. And that is when a series of ignorant attacks on the negative vote begins.
Perhaps changing the name of "downvote" to "adjustment" might provide a different perspective to whoever receives that "adjustment" in value.
I propose it as something that can help to benefit the negative context of such "adjustment".
Otherwise, I sincerely think that "adjustment" is necessary when there is overcompensated content and nowadays I use it for it with some frequency (with more incidence when I see abuses).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts
Yeah I get how downvotes affect people and myself at times, you try to think extra hard to make them personal and try to ignore that maybe it wasn't. It's not a nice thing to do and receive as @slobberchops put it in his comment above. I think seeing who gave the downvote, what kind of downvotes they usually give and if they maybe left a comment in either your post or on another post they downvoted helps realizing that maybe it wasn't personal and maybe they aren't aware of certain things.
Like when I leave someone a downvote, which happens seldom, I try to leave a comment. If the user let's me know that "oh okay but this is the first post in forever I've gotten big votes on" or something that may make me re-consider then I will. What I despise is people who instantly go on the offensive, say things like "this is censorship", "hive sucks and this will kill it", etc, then I know it's probably that they just care about maximizing rewards and are doing anything they can to get that to continue which won't go well from my point of reconsideration.