EDIT: Love the instant downvotes without any comments on why. Downvotes are totally helpful and not the least bit petty and stupid. I have 2 client using Discourse on their production sites and it works great.
Didn't down vote you, but I very much dislike Discourse. It is sold to be a better forum/discussion system, but it feels very unpleasant to use. They tried to break things just for the sake of breaking. Like having an endless scroll instead of paging is driving me nuts. I hate endless scroll, this is the most anti pattern that exists on the web probably.
It depends on how things have shaped up over time. I have read before that pg is ok with the use of downvotes to indicate disagreement or annoyance without follow up comments. Here's that comment from nearly nine years ago: [1]
> pg 3246 days ago | on: PG on trolls
> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
> It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
seems like there needs to be one down arrow for simply disagreeing with the comment, and another clickable entity for flagging that comment as inapproproriate/impolite/notconstructive/toxic, etc.