"Interesting, making downvotes costly seems like a good system." Say, I like the idea. No doubt people have discussed this to death elsewhere. You can defini

"Interesting, making downvotes costly seems like a good system." Say, I like the idea. No doubt people have discussed this to death elsewhere. You can definitely see downvotes used as simple disagreement or for punishing unpopular speech (rather than being wrong, let's say). That's a bummer but is a side effect of modern times. Let's say that a issuing a downvote resulted in a 15 minute break from posting or voting. You gotta want to do it. " people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about." I'm afraid that's baked deeply into the DNA of computer programmers.