I want to start by inviting everyone who are looking into this post to check the git commit linked before reading and after that read their current page, it will make more sense.
I think most people don’t understand the fact that Kagi is meta-search engine which literally collect the results of other search engines and display it and add very small amount of results from their index(tecilis).
They are starting to act shady this year(check the attached git commit to see their changes to their documentation page).
People basically pay them to search Yandex and Brave for them.
Before anyone say but privacy, they are closed source and there is a better open source meta search engines which actually respect your privacy and need your donations more than Kagi shareholders.
Open source alternative:
You can actually hide them in Voyager for example. Don’t need a special instance for it. You can also set the app to combined instead of individual tally.
To answer your question, upvotes and downvotes are fleeting on lemmy and can be oft meaningless. You could still sort content in posts by metrics, but hide votes, and get insight out of it.
This instance actually drops downvotes before they hit the database, so unless another instance tracks users on different instances, they simply disappear for people on this instance.