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Downvotes are fine and good, but downvoting affecting the visibility of your content is insane. Screw Reddit for that.
A mechanism to promote quality on-topic content and demote noise can be pretty valuable, especially somewhere with a high population. The original thinking on Reddit (and I've been there long enough to know) was that people would use voting as moderation, not agreement or disagreement.
An upvote was to mean "content like this belongs here" and a downvote the opposite. There were no comments at first, but it reasonably applied to them as well once they were added. Unfortunately, votes are too simple and too opaque to maintain a norm like that. Were I designing a discussion system, it would probably use labeling like Slashdot rather than simple voting.
There is no way possible you can make humans actually follow that principle. People always dumb things down as much as possible, and "I like this" or "I dislike this" is default. That's the problem.
Sure there is; you can make the UI require it.
Make what UI require what? I think there is a misunderstanding here.
Make the UI require a label/reason for a vote, like Slashdot.
Slashdot doesn't have a downvote. It has labels like "off-topic" and "flamebait" that serve to lower a comment's score. It's possible to misuse them of course, but that requires an active decision to do so; the obvious action is to pick a label honestly.