[blackflame7000]

I suggest an amendment to the downvote such that if your total lifetime positive (excluding downvotes) reaches say 1000 or 1500, you should also get the ability to downvote. It’s much easier to lose points than gain them on the site.

[SyneRyder]

I don't think it's easier to lose points here. Gaining points is easy if your comments are constructive and actionable. Opinions and anything argumentative generally isn't very useful.

One thing you can try is looking through your comment history and see which of your comments got the most upvotes. One of my highest upvotes was in a thread about whether software engineers should waste time doing telephone customer support, and I linked to a story of when William from Microsoft took a customer support call:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15813387

Another was a comment about where I got my first customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192711

Or linking to a strategy for finding product ideas:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14040708

Checking your most upvoted comments can also be a way to find topics that you should turn into a blog post. If the HN community found it interesting and suddenly gave you 10x the upvotes you usually get, then it's probably also useful to the wider world.

When I've been downvoted, it's usually because I've poorly researched something & provided incorrect information.

[blackflame7000]

While I agree with you that arguments are not constructive, a healthy disagreement of differing opinions should not have the implicit correctness go to the person with the ability to downvote his adversary. Furthermore, there is a psychological aspect to voting positively for a negatively voted comment unless its something you absolutely agree with. I might lack tact, (which is hard to convey in text), but that doesn't make answers I've submitted that were backed by cited facts only to be downvoted on trivial meta issues weren't 100% correct.

I personally think the downvoting feature is fine, just really overused by people with much more karma that it makes the website less enjoyable to visit, especially for new people. And sure, one of the things I love about this site is that there are legitimate gurus on here, but a lot of people take their ability to downvote to classic Dunning Kruger syndrome.

Perhaps a quarter point penalty for downvoting to stop spamming and for people to consider the worthiness of a downvote or ignore. After all, Karma is how you treat others, and constantly negging them with no explanation isn't very kind at all especially for the majority of the people on this site that just want to learn.

[scarface74]

You can only lose a maximum of 3 (4?) points on a single post. You can gain an unlimited number of points.

[blackflame7000]

True, but each rebuttal is another potential shellacking.