Downvotes do the opposite. They leave people feeling bad and build a culture of hate and division.
I don't mean to sound harsh, but you cannot protect people like this at the cost of losing useful information and accuracy. At the risk of sounding dramatic, this is what is becoming wrong with the world, not just forums or voting. People are upset at anything, no matter how much you pander to them. Medals given to all participants not just 1st 2nd 3rd. It's crazy, and it's very wrong.
Downvoting is very important on some mediums. To use another platform as an example:
On YouTube when they removed the downvote stats we could no longer at a glance see what is likely a poor video, or "bad advice".
The many tech videos with very bad advice now only show the positive upvotes from inexperienced people believing they were helped by the bad advice. When in fact those "250" upvotes are meaningless when you see the "3500" downvotes!
This is comparative here. If someone posts a thread advising to invest heavily in some new niche, and in fact it's dead or for whatever reason very bad advice, only allowing upvotes skews the accuracy of the overall opinion.
20 people agree with this terrible advice as they have already invested in this niche.
With no downvotes everyone sees advice as "+20" and so more people invest badly as a result.
With downvotes, even if 15 sane people with experience see and downvote it, now people only see "+5", which weakens the potential it's good advice.
"Hate and division" comes from being hateful, not from useful and accurate metrics like downvoting. If people feel bad from facts then that's on them, the world should absolutely not remove accurate facts just because some people cannot handle them. That is not fair on everyone else.
Besides, better to make people feel sad and not buy more bad domains than just upvote them to oblivion and let them become in financial ruin, no?