Critique instead downvote

@Background Pony #D658  
Also some artists prefer downvotes and like having them. Me included. P;

You’re being silly about all this. Let me explain all the ways how.
 
First,  
a piece not getting comments and getting votes has nothing to do with each other. It seems to me you got fixated on this as a convenient scapegoat without thinking about it for no reason.  
Your art is not getting detailed critiques has nothing to do with votes distracting people and more to do with Derpibooru not being a critique site in the first place. Maybe you looked at, perhaps, DeviantArt and thought, hey, all sites should work this way. But DB is not a fans-talk-to-artist type site, it’s more like a community talks to each other site (two fans having a chat in an artist’s comment section would be rare and even rude on DA), and even more than that an image storage site. A lot of people who come here to upload and find art (because it’s better organized), but do their commenting and community participation elsewhere.
 
So if you’ve been posting art here to get artistic feedback; you’ve been using the site wrong.
 
Not even DeviantArt is neccessarily the best place for artistic growth. If that’s what you want, there are many good MLP places, I recommend the MLP Drawing School (Reddit and Discord) chat, for example. We also have our own artist chat here .
 
Second,  
your “plan” is bonkers.  
You are literally asking for a site function to be removed to encourage the use of another function. Think about that.  
You equate downvotes with haters.  
You assume that the removal of downvotes would transform those into long artistic critiques, which is nonsense.  
You assume artists that are sensitive to being downvoted would prefer reading “hater” comments. Yeahhh.  
I feel like there are dozens of things about your “solution” you didn’t quite think through.
 
Third,  
already tested and tried and community opinion.  
There have been other admins with views on votes similar to yours.  
The recent Hide function for example is a fruit of those attempts.  
Overall though, it has been proven again and again that the community finds the voting system useful and does not want to see it gone - experiments to remove it have been met with massive community backlash.  
People like having that extra metric that they can filter for (no way to count and filter comments, I’m afraid, the way you can measure likes). For me it’s a very nice and easy tool to gauge what is popular or unpopular on the board.