Why do we have a down vote rep threshold for meta?

Question

I read in the FAQs that voting is done to express agreement or disagreement over here:

On Meta Stack Overflow, voting is often used to express agreement or disagreement, not to point out a lack of quality or helpfulness. Please don't be concerned if you receive downvotes – members of the community may simply disagree with your bug, feature request, support issue, or the nature of the discussion.

Then why is there a rep threshold for down vote? The first thing that comes to mind is that if we allow down voting from the start, we may get trollers who would keep down voting stuff. However, there are other ways to deal with it. For example, we could check the activity of the user in the discussion (measure by number of questions/answers/comments and also number of times upvoted (this is different from rep)) before enabling this privilege.

EDIT

Use Case(unfortunately my own):

When I first saw meta, I knew nothing of it and nothing about Area51 and got a lot of down votes for that question. I lost a lot of reputation for a starter that day and was paying for that first timers mistake for some time before I got that reputation back.

EDIT

Please condider the discussion of thread as a feature request. I think there are mainly two suggestions from the various comments:

• Remove down-voting all together

  OR

• Change the down-vote reputation threshold to 15(same as up votes)

Answer 1

This and related issues are a consequence of the way Meta has evolved. The mechanisms for voting etc. existed long before the community norm that "on Meta, voting works differently" solidified.

Meta was originally implemented with the code for StackOverflow, because it was convenient, and it gave us something much better than UserVoice.

But over time, the consequences of using the platform in a way distinct from the original intent have become apparent. In particular

• Meta is for discussions, so
  • ordering by downvotes doesn't make as much sense (but still has some value)
  • comments become much more important (but we suffer from the lack of threading)
  • penalising by downvotes (losing rep) is odd
  • answers which are downvoted to -3 or below are grayed out, implying the less popular point of view is also less valid
• Downvotes are supposed to mean "I disagree", but
  • they require more rep than upvotes
  • if you make too many disagreeable questions, you will be question-blocked
  • they feel extremely negative to a community conditioned by voting on StackOverflow
  • the norm doesn't allow you to express "I see value in you bringing this discussion up, but I disagree". In fact, downvotes on meta might mean "I think this is junk" or "I disagree with your point of view".

Negative votes on meta aren't trolling, any more than positive votes are trolling. They shouldn't be treated differently. You shouldn't have to accumlate 150 points by conforming with the community just to allow you to express your disagreement. Other Metas have a very low threshold (5 rep) to allow participation. It's telling that they also have done away with Meta reputation.

Our system here is not a good solution, but it mostly works. I also hear there are rumours of a Meta overhaul. An obvious simple hack to improve things would be to set the downvote limit to 15, in symmetry with upvotes. A minimal barrier to entry seems reasonable, but no more.

Answer 2

We have a reputation threshold for downvotes for the same reason we have one on the others sites:

It forces users to interact with the site before acting negatively.

Upvotes have a lower threshold because we want to encourage upvotes. Similarly, downvotes cost reputation as a method to discourage downvoting without careful thought.

It doesn't matter that the downvotes have a slightly different meaning here than elsewhere - we still want 1) users to interact with the site prior to employing them and 2) to generally discourage thoughtless downvotes.

Keep in mind that if you have enough experience on other sites you will receive 100 rep here for associating your account, and therfore only need to post one or two good questions or answers in order to get that last 25 reputation needed to downvote.

Downvotes are purposefully slightly above the account association bonus to make sure people actually come into contact with the community via real posts (not just comments) before downvoting, even though they are already experienced with the platform. Each community is different enough that one needs to watch them for awhile before downvoting.