Contrary to popular belief, there are actually three options. You can disagree with something by not upvoting it (instead of downvoting it). On beehaw, you can get an indicator of what the overall community thinks of a response by seeing whether or not it has a significant number of upvotes relative to the rest of the content around it.

I find that anything that I would want to downvote should instead be reported anyway. I reserve downvotes on other platforms for posts/comments that are made in bad faith, which on Beehaw is often enough to report for anyway. On other platforms, I've seen downvotes used in exactly the way you describe, and it's led to at least me wanting to interact as minimally as possible knowing that as soon as I post something, some bot might just downvote it right away, immediately influencing the kinds of responses I get because apparently many people operate as part of a hivemind.

I think downvotes make it too easy to avoid discussion, I'd prefer if someone has a problem with something, they actually speak up and say something. Then that response getting lots of upvotes is a much better indicator of what the community feels.

Yeah, same. I went back to my facebook groups and instagram pages for a while when reddit went crappy, and it really highlighted how helpful downvotes were

Downvotes are helpful if they are used properly (off-topic, hate speech, rediquitte, etc.), but I see people using it as a dislike button lately and that has made many discussion annoying and exhausting. Also, downvotes latently breed a hivemind which is like one of the worst parts of reddit.