The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009)
One idea I had was to be able to see who downvoted a post and be able to list of the last 50 or so posts a particular user has downvoted. Thus would hopefully shame users who downvote for reasons other then to keep the conversation constructive.<p>You could even allow downvoting of the downvote, so users could lose karma for downloading an insightful post that they simply disagreed with.<p>Of course, if you allowed downvoting the downvote of a downvote, and so on recursively, you could have downvote wars between two users, where they both drain each other&#x27;s karma down to zero. I don&#x27;t see much problem with this, because anyone willing to participate in such a battle seems childish enough that they deserve what they get.