While looking over the idea on increasing the weight of down votes, I started thinking about the distribution for reputation scores and wonder if the accepted answer bonus of +15 is still a good number.
REP SCORES:
- +10 per upvote
- -5 per downvote (proposed/planned?)
- -1 per cast downvote
- +2 per acceptance of answer
- +15 per accepted post
Since a down votes may be increased 150% from 2 to 5 points, the accepted answer will not be worth as much compared to a down vote before. Saying that you will get +15 for an accepted answer and potentially lose that by a couple of down votes doesn't seem to reward the user who answered the question enough.
Recently I've seen a few jQuery and CSS questions where folks were coming in and literally swiping the previously posted answers (almost verbatim at times) and then place a few down votes on the other posts to put themselves towards the top of the list. In these cases, even if you get awarded the accepted answer bonus, you still got dinged pretty good from the other users tactics.
Should the accepted answer bonus be increased from +15 to +20, +25, maybe even +30? This would seem to reward the answerer a bit more and help recover some of the points lost for the odd down votes. I also think that this could potentially improve the quality of answers as folks really have more to shoot for and also increase the number of folks trying to get "the answer."
My only concern in this is that by increasing the rep score for answers, the behavior of answer swiping and tactical down voting would increase.