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If you desire to see this website progress and evolve using the feature recommendations, why would you want to take away your ability to unequivocally say no to a feature that you think make the site worse.

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Being able to clearly say "no" is very important for a meaningful discussion. Without downvotes, it would be impossible to tell the difference between a feature that people simply do not care about and a feature that people are actively against for one reason or another.   Take, for example, a minor QoL improvement that has people thinking "I don't need it, but I won't complain if it happens." Compare that with, for example, a request to change a feature that many people rely on. Without downvotes, they could not properly express that the requested change would break their workflow. Sure, they could give +1 and a comment with their reasons against the feature, but this would force them to pretend that they agreed to a certain measure.   And like several others have said, just because more features are suggested, the WA team does not magically get the resources to implement all of them. They already do check every suggestion. Knowing whether a suggestion is merely uninteresting or actively disliked helps with figuring out the priorities.

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We're not going to pull a YouTube and hide/get rid of the thumbsdown button.

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Being able to vote both ways is important in a balanced community! World Anvil is made up of mostly respectful people, and not all ideas are good or serve the community, even if they were put forward with good intentions. Your argument of the World Anvil team being able to make all the decisions on changes removes the point of community votes all together; I feel like being able to vote in both directions makes my opinion heard properly.

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It's not fun to have a suggestion downvoted, but I think there is a point to it. I've a suggested feature in the list right now. It has not that many votes but those who voted do like the feature idea. Those who don't vote simply has not found the use for the feature, which is fine, but they also don't mind to put the feature there. If you downvote, you either feel the suggeestion would damage your experience of World Anvil, or that you think that the developers' time could be used to other things. Both I think are valid opinions too take into consideration.   I do think tough, that a downvote MUST come with a comment.   I had a suggestion with ONE who put in -300 without any reason explained, and that becomes a pointless statement.

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Please don't censor people. I think we are civil and mature enough on WA to use and receive downvotes properly. There is nothing fun in downvoting someone and features won't become better or more numerous just because we can't downvote. Bad ideas would get implemented though, because there wouldn't be any way for others to point out how bad the idea can be.

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The number of feature requested upvoted really, really does not have any correlation to the number of features being implemented. The team doesn't just suddenly have more time or resources.

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Downvoting does have an important use, as others have pointed out already. I prefer to vote positively for suggestions but sometimes a down vote is valuable. I think it's always good to respect the person behind the suggestion and particularly with downvotes I feel a polite explanation helps to keep discussion civil and foster positive debate. WA is a supportive community and downvotes shouldn't be personal or whimsical. Based on what I read on these boards I don't think they are being abused.

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Coming from someone who's put forward suggestions in the past, I'm glad for the downvote feature because it allows people to express their true opinions about a possible feature. If nobody would like or use it, that's extremely helpful for the staff to know when they reject or accept something. Removing the downvote feature would silence people's opinions and make the feature voting system practically useless.

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Others have put his much better already, but I just wanted to say, that removing the downvote will not make people like suggestions, it will just reroute them. I believe history, and recent history at that, has taught us this is not a good idea.

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Interesting suggestion and I appreciate you sharing your viewpoint! As someone who likes to put forward feature suggestions I can understand your frustration when some people downvote it or don't think it's a good idea, and I don't think they do so lightly or spend their coins just for fun.   Sometimes it's clear to the community that a feature already exists and we can downvote with a comment to let the person know where the feature is and let the team know to disregard the request.   Other times feature suggestions can be really niche and specific, likely to be used only by the requester or like 5 other people - some people don't want such features and others in the community we would rather the dev team prioritise other requested features.   People often comment with their downvote with an alternative solution or workaround that the requester can do in World Anvil   The ability to downvote (as well as upvote) is the thing that speeds up the team's decision-making process for feature releases and QoL improvements to the site :D   The team manually reviews every single suggestion and replies to them here, so I don't think that removing negative votes would mean that more features get analysed.   Besides, it's often encouraged that when features get declined due to low support they can be resubmitted again :)

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This is the logic behind dictatorships

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If you can only vote yes or stay silent, then it really wouldn’t be much of a voting system. If a lot of members really dislike a suggestion, that’s something that the team needs to know when deciding on whether or not to implement. Silencing negative opinions and implementing more suggested features will likely inspire anger and disharmony as more suggestions get posted to undo past suggestions. I think it’s better to allow members to express themselves and voice their opinions before changes are made.

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Voting against something costs points, just as voting for something does. So I don't think that people vote against suggestions just for fun.

WA has a very small team and they can't add everything the huge community wants. That's why the voting system is there. So they don't invest a ton of time and energy to implement something that most people dislike, don't need or don't ever use. They want to focus their energy on things that will help the bigger part of the community with their worldbuilding.
Let's say we take away the ability to say "no" to a feature suggestion (no matter if that is "I don't want it", "I don't need it" or whatever reason to say no) Let's say there are three suggestions. A has a ton of upvotes and points, B and C have about the same amount, though a lot less than A. Unfortunately, A can't be implemented at this time so the team works on implementing B and C. Once they are done, they release the two new features and the suggestion board gets flooded with the request to take feature B back or change it in a way that would require a complete re-invention of the feature. Now the team has to either invest a ton of time to change it or roll it back and they will have lost valuable time they could have used to implement other features that a lot of people would have wanted. All because people were not allowed to voice their dislike for Suggestion B.
Or the feature suggestions get flooded beforehand already because people need to make a suggestion to counter suggestion B and it is a lot more for the team to wade through. How does that make the system better?

Votes do not make or break a suggestion. Things get implemented despite low points and a couple of downvotes because the devs see the value or it is a very easy change. I don't think the community needs to be silenced. Sure, it would help if people did also leave a comment to explain why they are against something, but you can't force them to do so. klicking like or dislike (or in this case + or - X points) is just easier and still shows the overall opinion.

Of course progress and development are important but the devs are doing so much and are constantly working on improving WA and make it the best experience for everyone of us. Maybe it's a language problem (not a native speaker) but I find it almost offensive to say that greatness is not possible as long as the users in the community are allowed to show if they don't like something. Dimi and his team are no mindless robots that don't think for themselves, after all.

Just my thoughts and opinions on this suggestion.

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There are such thing as bad ideas, even well intentioned bad ideas.

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