I also made this comment before I realised what the OP was trying to achieve. I thought he was downvoted because he asked "stupid" question as I was barely awake at this point. Haha
I still think some communities would benefit from disabling them though. But as you say there probably isn't a way to achieve that with current lemmy.
This community urgently needs to be hosted on an instance without downvotes. Maybe there's one somewhere.
@Blaze you like migrating comunities to better places so maybe you could look into that. I don't mind featuring the alternative community above this one when I implement discussion section in the directory.