Dear @joshman

Most of all: thank you for this amazing comment and I'm sorry for replying so late. I somehow skipped your comment :/

What is your proposal? Often I see people complaining about the concept of downvotes, but they don't offer solutions.

My solution is still the same:

• punishment is short term solution. awareness and education matters. So whenever one is planning to downvote someone, then in the first place he should warn this user and only if abuse repeats - then downvote his content.

Obviously that would require so much more effort on part of downvoters. So it won't ever happen. However without educating people and letting them know what they did wrong - we will never achieve much.

Does it sound like I'm complaining about decentralized ruling style? Perhaps. But it's not true that honest users are not being punished without having any explanation given to them. It's happening very often and it's hard to believe that you never have seen downvote abusers in action.

I will still repeat one more time: Awareness is always the key. Punishment doesn't work in long term.

Yours
Piotr