What should I use it for?
In case of posts - should I downvote things that I don’t agree with? Or things that I don’t want to see in my feed (posts with low amount of votes fell more to the bottom)? Or things that I consider harmful/stupid/younameit?
In case of comments - should I downvote something that I don’t agree with? When should I use this button in case of comments. Or maybe I should not - cause what’s the point, actually?
Imagine the sub is big. Lets say 500,000 users. There are many posts each day. Now you’re not wrong. A sub can decide that users shall never use the downvote button, but always report a post for a mod to decide if the post is allowed to stay, or if a post will be removed.
In that case, the mods have way more work. They have to decide on every reported post, no matter if there is one single report, or hundreds of reports for one post. The mods have to decide if a post will be removed or not. If you ask me, that’s quite a task. You’re deciding this for all of the 500,000 users, after all. It’s not just you and your personal opinion, but you have to think of the whole community. I ask: Is that even possible? What if you can’t help but decide largely based on your personal opinion, even when that doesn’t overlap with the bulk of the community? Or what if a mod loves to be a kind of an dictator and starts to remove posts even without reports - simply because he doesn’t like them?
The other option is to use the system to sort content. Content that most people like will be above, and content that most people find to be off-topic will be below, or even collapsed if enough people found it to be off-topic or inappropriate.
That way, everybody can help just by browsing and using the system. The power of the crowd, so to speak. Why go the problematic and long road to remove posts as a mod, when everybody can help shape the community?