It’s just the internet, not necessarily a redditism.

And instead of a rainbow of downvoting options, just disable showing the vote counter.

This way, you can still downvote, but nobody sees the end result except maybe mods and admins for moderation purposes.

You can still use the upvote/downvote ratio to sort comments or posts in your feed, but it would be working under the hood instead of out in the open.