Meh... Downvotes are next to meaningless.

The only thing that I dislike about the current way that downvotes are handled is that if you have an unpopular opinion that isn't toxic that getting massively downvoted prevents you from interacting with the community in the form of a time out.

So even if you've generated a lot of good discussion on a controversial subject and weren't really toxic in any ream way, because people can downvote you for your opinion, which I think is fine, you can get fucked over for generating good content for reddit if you're in a minority.

Even though I think that moderation needs to be fixed, I think that having penalties for downvotes should be handled by moderation on a case by case basis. If they see someone actually being toxic then they'd have to enable it to count towards time outs and maybe give them a certain amount of upvotes recquired as a pentance, like maybe once they get 500 upvotes the time out will be lifted or something like that.

But even though some of the best of Reddit is when you sort by controversal, (dear god not all of it a lot of it is way awful) those poor souls are on their way to not being able respond to all the responses that they generated.