Quote Originally Posted by Lambdafish View Post
Abuse in what way? If a point is disagreed on by a lot of people, surely adding a lot of dislikes is a better indicator than flooding the thread with negative comments. Why feed trolls and bump threads back to the top when you can just dislike them and move on.
Functionally it's also useless. You don't need a dislike button, you can simply see a complaint below it getting a lot of likes if people disagree.

But the honest answer: People dislike anything that disagrees with their (often narrow) worldview, not just "troll" threads. Even posting purely informational stuff gets disliked into oblivion if it's not what people want to hear.