I’m fully against any “popularity” system (especially one which empowers users who “support” the site via payment). Upvotes, downvotes, and agree: I think they should all be gone. When such a system is in place, users have an intrinsic motivation to speak empty-yet-popular remarks. It also scares aware users from speaking if they have a diverging opinion. Why encourage people to place value in the judgment of others? 

This.

Not just here but in general I think it negatively impacts people from posting or discourage them into getting into a conversation.

And people with gold supporter status giving a vote counts for 3 or 4, so only 3 or 4 people doing it can already hide posts

Isn’t it 5 for Gold? I have Bronze, so I get 2, and I know Silver gets 3. It’s a very unfair system tbh. A Gold support literally has the power to almost unanimously determine what is the “popular” opinion in any given article. I only pay b/c I don’t want ads.

I remember gold gave more, so at last 4 based on what you say. I remember when the system first rolled in but I'm not sure the exact weight each tier have.

Anyway, hiding posts and voting weight are the only 100% bad aspects, everything else, even the downvotes itself, are up to debate.

Don't really care tbh, but the forum agree system is at least good as sometimes instead of just typing the same thing or a "yes", I can just agree and let it be. Sometimes I want to agree and also post it about it myself too to register it, but many times it does save time to just agree with it.

https://www.vgchartz.com/supporters.php

Gold is 4x voting power, silver is 3x voting power, and bronze is 2x voting power. I remember at one point it was 5 downvotes for a comment to be hidden, but we increased it to 10 downvotes. I'd be fine with no longer hiding comments.

I'd also be fine with getting rid of the downvotes, but keep the ability to upvote comments. Or maybe have the ability to still downvote, but that doesn't affect the overall "upvote" count. Or keep the separate like how on YouTube you used to see the number of likes and dislikes.

The big thing about becoming a supporter is that all the money goes to the writing, sales, and development team. 

Downvotes are terrible. People use them to signify disagreement, in addition to poor comment quality, but the site treats them only as a signal of poor quality. I don't mind upvotes though.

I kind of consider forum agrees as upvotes too, but I'm not sure. I tend to try to use the feature for what it's supposed to, i.e. agreeing, but sometimes I do end up using it to kind of 'upvote' stuff too - but I guess usually there isn't much difference between the two.

I miss the old upvote/downvote system that Ars Technica had. That one was truly special, as you needed to specify WHY the upvote or downvote as.

Upvote for instance had "agree", "adds to story", "interesting"
Downvote had things like "disagree", "off-topic", doesn't contribute", "spamming"

Both had other categories, but those are the only ones I remember right now. Suffice to say that if there would also come some forum downvotes, it would be great to implement it in a similar system.

I'm kind of tempted to say that I haven't really refrained from meaningfully participating because of forum agrees. However, if I think about it a bit more, it's likely that at least some of those low-value 'I agree' posts would have been accompanied by further elaboration, which could spark further discussion or at least stimulate other participants. I'm not sure how much real value this would create, but it's probably a thing regardless.

One point in favour of forums agrees is that they're a really low-threshold way to participate. It lets people easily see what others agree about, and it lets the poster see if someone agrees, even when no one necessarily posts anything (I'm sure some would refrain from posting low-value 'I agree' posts even without the current agree system, which could result in zero participation about some posts).

Just scrap them in its entirety. The most downvoted comments (usually the same user) should be able to be read by everyone. So we call all point and laugh together.