Downvoting costs newcomers. For old timers, it's basically free. I've been on SO more-or-less since the beginning. I rarely log in, probably haven't in over a

Downvoting costs newcomers. For old timers, it's basically free. I've been on SO more-or-less since the beginning. I rarely log in, probably haven't in over a year, but I know that, every time I do, my karma's taken another big jump. I was lucky enough to get in early on and get in a few good questions and answers on some thorny technical issues, and now I just keep on getting karma for free because some fixed percentage of people who run into these problems will get sent to my SO answer on Google, and some fixed percentage of those will upvote. Sometimes I even get double points when I answered my own question. So, insofar as I'm getting my karma for free, I don't value it much, and downvoting costs me basically nothing. I probably wouldn't start noticing the price unless the cost of a single downvote were at least 1% of my current karma.