"Benford's law, also known as the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation that in many real-life sets of numerical data, the leading digit is likely to be small."
Downvoted comments are bad for the community. They are literally negative. Remove downvotes. Anything that truly deserves downvotes probably deserves flagging/deading, too.
Downvotes change how you think about reading comments. Instead of "was this helpful?" you're thinking "do i love this or hate this?". It's polarizing, and as the number of users increases, it's easy for a comment to hit -4 in a couple minutes.
People feel bad when they get downvoted (often because they feel the downvotes are unjust), and some of them turn to trolling or flaming as a defense mechanism. This spreads across threads and infects the whole community. Emotions are contagious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage