Why do you lose reputation for downvoting answers?

The motivation behind it is to put emphasis on up-voting or not voting at all. This way, down votes will carry more weight and it will also prevent users from abusing the system by down-voting excessively.

According to what the founders, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, discussed on an episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, they wanted to find a way to discourage users from down-voting for less legitimate reasons (say a pro-Java developer down-voting everything remotely related to .NET or the like).

I have to admit, it definitely puts it into perspective to compare how many points you gain for other activities vs. the 1 point you lose for a down vote. It is effectively the smallest penalty that the Stack Overflow scoring system will permit.

Also, it may not be the best possible approach, but one has to start somewhere.

Note that you only lose reputation for downvoting answers, not for downvoting questions, and downvoting a Community Wiki answer does not deduct reputation from the voter or the author(s) of the answer.

So you will think twice before doing it.

To be a slight deterrent to someone downvoting everything they don't like.

So how is that different than somebody voting up indiscriminately? Instead of the java developer voting down everything .NET, you have the java developer voting up everything Java. I also don't see how marking something wrong down should degrade your reputation when you are doing the community a favor. Maybe you should just get a "curmudgeon" badge.

While I see the simple votes as easy to understand, I'd rather see something like badges for answers. That way you could have things like "verified" where the voter had a choice like "I have implemented this answer and it works for me", Or "incorrect" where the choice was "I have tried this answer and it does not appear to work".

I often wonder if -2 off the person your down-voting is enough. Maybe it should be -10 to equal the amount they might get off an up-vote. I only say this as one user could have got one down-vote and one up-vote which would still equate to +8 rep points for them. (Even though their vote score would still be at zero).

Of course I understand that -10 might seem excessive, I’m just looking at a view point of balancing the rep when it comes to up-votes and down-votes.

Keeping it to -1 for the person who originally cast the down-vote but giving -10 to the person who's been given that down-vote might seem fairer to some, and make it more acceptable when losing some rep to down-vote a bad post/answer.

EDIT: I do believe that down-voting should be kept to a minimum and only used when really neccessary.

I know it's a deterrent to stop people abusing the system but it still seems unfair to loose reputation for pointing out a rubbish reply / question. I for one won't ever vote anyone down now which probably isn't a good thing?

The loss of a point on a down-vote is really a mechanism to punish newer users and prevent them from abusing the system. Let's face it; the 30K rep users here really could care less about a point, but they've gotten to that point because they've been around a while and are active in the system. They (theoretically) know better when to down-vote and when to add a comment to help the asker/answerer in question. New users, on the other hand, value every point they can get and need incentive to not just go on a down-vote binge because they didn't have their coffee.

Or at least that's what I believe.

I like the idea. It keeps people from mass down voting for the sake of down voting, since you yourself take a penalty for the action.

I think it's to discourage people from down voting indiscriminately.

I'll admit to being annoyed about something in the SOverse and thinking "I'd like to downvote that". The cost associated with that helps me keep things in perspective. Nothing has yet been worth the downvote.

I should also note that when you don't have much in the way of rep to start with the cost of a downvote is proportionately far greater than for someone with a lot of rep. This favours having high-rep users as the ones who do the downvoting - which is in line with the basic idea of rep IMO.

It seems reasonable to me. You're limited to a certian number of down-votes a day anyway, right? If you're contributing positively to the site at all, then I doubt you'd notice the change in your reputation.

It also seems reasonable to me. I've only downvoted once, and that was on a truly bad answer. (I've been downvoted at least three times, and I think four, and I understand why on most of them ... )

The one-point penalty is a "keep-it-honest" deal. Downvote for something BAD, but not just because you don't like it.

It is a good way to stop you downvoting all answers except your own, which could increase your answer's ranking, and would be anti-community.

It's a deterrent to some users who might otherwise down-vote indiscriminately. I think most people would down-vote only rarely regardless, but there are some who might want to use down-voting to penalize other users for having a different opinion, for using the wrong language, for having too much rep, etc.

My guess is that it is to make you think twice: Is it really worth 2 whole reputation points to mark this as bad, or should I just ignore it? It seems to work quite effectively.

Free down-votes would probably result in a habitual down-voting of mostly anything that someone doesn't agree with; a small penalty lessens that tendency.

One point would be, to avoid excessive use of it. You should only down vote if it is a bad post.

One Rep-Point is not much but it makes some think twice before spending it ;)

The reasons for down-voting are too numerous and complex to be reliably and accurately discriminated, some down-votes are justified, others not at all. Losing reputation, and losing a single point, is a compromise, a Keep It Simple approach.

Here are various reasons for down-voting, gathered from common sens and from answers and comments above, arbitrarily ranked from those calling for more than 1 point in reputation loss to those calling for no reputation loss (or even a gain):

• retaliation: a user feels offended by some comments, or finds out who down-voted him/her and goes on a down-vote rampage
• indiscriminate down-vote: a user is in a bad mood, is upset, irritated, having a bad day, doesn't like a user, the answer...
• SPAM: question or answer is clearly written with a will to spam the site, it's helping the community to shadow these by a down vote (SPAM should be flagged, edit: flagging a post as SPAM automatically downvotes the post at no reputation loss downvote, from Catjia's comment)
• the answer contains offending wording (they can be flagged too)
• the question has been already asked, shows no effort from the user to search by him/herself
• the answer given is off-topic (similar to SPAM but in a more subtle way)
• the answer given is misleading or plain wrong

I'd sure support a no-reputation-loss when down-voting spam, and even a reputation gain when down-voting a misleading or wrong answer with a justification for the down-vote; someone who aggressively down vote for no given reason should lose more than 1 point.

But unless SE introduces Artificial Intelligence to analyze users behavior and the content of their justification for down-vote so the system can sort legitimate down-votes from those given in pure revenge, a -1 loss is a good compromise.

Something that surprisingly isn't mentioned in any of the Answers is the fact that if the question is deleted you get your rep back. In other words, if enough people down-vote the question, this generally results in the question being deleted by the questions author, assuming the author is still able to delete the question. I my experience, I tend to get about 50%-60% of my DVs back on Stack Overflow, but I also contribute occasionally to a few of the other Stack Exchange sites, and have found that people often leave questions that are down-voted, and have no answer, un-deleted, whereas on Stack Overflow people put much effort into maintaining a spotless account.