Unpopular Opinion

Only allowing downvotes after so many upvotes would help stop trolls and could help generate more engagement via upvotes.

I strongly doubt this. I suspect it would make downvotes seem like something you 'earned' the right to spend, leading to more downvoting.

Have you tried using an app that lets you hide the votes, such as Jerboa?

Forums that don't allow downvoting at all can be interesting. It removes both the wisdom of the crowd (for quickly muting the idiots) but also removes the petty spiteful downvoters. In my experience this approach can work OK if there are mods banning people for repeat/egregious offenses. Of course moderation is a whole other thing.

Anyway, I don't know if your idea would work long term but it could be fun to try it out in individual communities that want to try the rule, or do it one day a week.

I disagree. It doesn't matter to me if it is bots or grumpy users dow voting. I think the overall benefit of having them treated the same out weighs negatives of abuse. It adds value to the masses vs enabling the individual, yep it comes with feeling bad but that is life. Pushes quality of posts and discussion, some post truly don't deserve a retort only a downvote. Got to be fair and fair includes the ugly.

I think I should down vote this.

Twice.

While I tend to agree, I think there is a bigger issue in trying to condense a range of reactions into fivw options (no action, up vote, down vote, public comment, direct comment).

Upvote for taking effort to add content.

I mean there is a small part of me that feels rejected when I see downvotes. Another small part that is paranoid that someone is following me and downvoting me just out of spite. And the remainder uses it as an opportunity to reflect on what I said to see if either I could have worded it better or to rethink my position on whatever it was I wrote.

My only complaint is that people (myself included, I’ll admit) don’t always leave a comment to why they downvoted. I get it. The culture isn’t always conducive to a good faith discussion/disagreement. But it should be.

People should be safe to disagree with me. In fact, let me put it out there right now:

I will never put you down for coming at me with a good faith disagreement of opinions about anything I say.

Downvotes absolutely suck. And that's why some users are so attached to them. Part of the culture that evolved on reddit was that if anyone even mentioned downvotes some people downvoted them "on principle". I have seen people argue that without downvotes upvotes are meaningless. I think that really people like downvotes because it's the nearest most non-technical users can get to reaching through the screen and punching another user.

I suggested once, that in order to downvote, we add a little effort into the process (same could be done for upvoting in my opinion so it doesn't come across as unbalancing things) like making people type in a description of why, or even do like a captcha for the downvote to register. You would have thought I suggested personally beating their grandmother with a lead pipe.

I know people got superheated with my idea, but in my opinion this can be a mental health issue for some and it's worth discussing, not just crapping on. It just seems way too easy to do a driveby downvote brigade. If something is truly that bad, then people shouldn't be too troubled by putting in just a little bit of extra effort to downvote it, and the truly bad posts will still get what they deserve if that's what people think they are doing with this.

I am glad you understand that this is unpopular.

I get the idea behind this, people who are negative for the sake of being negative are a blight, but there shouldn't really be a hard-line rule. Sometimes you just find yourself in a thread of the fediverse full of awful comments, not just things you disagree with, but things that are racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic.

I know that I've gone into comment sections where I've handed out dozens of downvotes, though I also reported most of those same comments. I wouldn't want to have a little pop-up that says "sorry, you can't downvote in this thread until you upvote twice as many".

I assume y'all are downvoting this post because you think its a popular opinion :P

If not, do you think users should be able to contribute nothing but downvotes to the platform, or do you disagree with my methodology of limiting these users?

It's sadly frustrating because it discourages opposing opinions. I always try to upvote the things that make me want to respond. Whether it's something I can add to or something I disagree with, I'll only downvote when something is obviously spam or deliberately inflammatory without adding to the conversation.

I have seen some mods ban swathes of users with excessively negative voting records, encouraging them to curate their feed instead. I think the ratios were closer to 95% downvotes than the 2:1 you suggest, but the example stands. :)