Weighted Down-Voting based on Reputation

Question

I've been having a perplexing issue with the down-voting feature on SO lately.

When somebody down-votes my answers, I'd really like to know something about the user who down-voted me. It's certainly not because I have a grudge against the other user. Quite the opposite, I'd like a little insight to if it's somebody who has a high reputation (and thus a little more weight when it comes to their opinions).

Obviously, there's no good way to show exactly which user down-voted an answer without starting a flame war. My only other reasonable thought was to weight the down-vote. It's quite simple in concept:

A User with a high reputation downvoting your answer = More points deducted

It could easily be done in steps based on Rep:

     1 - 5000 = -2 Rep
 5001 - 10000 = -3 Rep
10001 - 15000 = -4 Rep

...and so on. That way, when you see the decrease you at least know the range of the user that downvoted you and then can (theoretically) see if there's something seriously flawed in the answer (which requires fixing/deleting) or simply a user mis-understanding part of the answer.

I understand that this isn't perfect logic but, in my opinion, it's better than not knowing anything about who downvoted you (or why).

Answer 1

There are two disconnects here. One is that high reputation implies better downvoting. You can be knowledgeable on both the system of downvoting properly and the subject matter of a post without needing to have high reputation. Likewise, people with high reputation may not actually know the subject matter at hand, but they can still downvote for reasons like poorly formatted questions which are completely irrelevant to reputation. So adding weight is not a good idea.

The more egregious disconnect is the idea that high reputation users should have greater control on the reputation of other users. This would allow a small group of high reputation users to deal crushing blows to other users because of possibly minor effects. It greatly unbalances the system - just because one user had more reputation than another, I suddenly take a hefty -8 for that one downvote? Maybe the higher reputation user knows better and the downvote on the question is more useful, but that should not be any reason that the user suffers exponentially for it.

There simply is no real relation between how much reputation a user has, and the effect of downvotes. Maybe you might trust their voice more, but this is punishing the target of the downvote very seriously for unrelated reasons to their offense.

Answer 2

High rep doesn't necessarily equal the in-depth knowledge you need to answer a question, or judge an answer appropriately.

Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone potentially misreads an answer. Everyone has a bad day where they just feel like unleashing their fury on the first thing they see with even the slightest issue.

I'm not saying that all downvotes are invalid. Certainly, I would argue that the very vast majority of downvotes are totally legitimate.

But a system weighted entirely on rep isn't going to work. I could, for example, downvote a perl answer on Stack Overflow, and your system would ding that user 3 points. Yet, I know almost nothing of any weight about perl; my rep is all from C#/.NET and Objective-C/Cocoa.

Novel idea, interesting approach, but ultimately not in favor of it.

Trust me, if your answer has issues, you'll know because either someone will comment (eventually) on it, someone may edit it, or the answer will turn gray from being downvoted into oblivion. Ultimately, you have most of the feedback you need already.