Why does voting down decrement Reputation

Question

if an answer is wrong , then we can vote it and the wrong answer goes down the list,but why decrementing the hard-earned reputation??

we need to bring a change to that policy.

Decremented reputation because you shouldn't be posting low quality, bad or wrong answers. — Seth, Commented Mar 23, 2014 at 19:16
Are you asking why you loose rep when you cast a downvote or why you loose rep when someone else downvotes your post? — terdon, Commented Mar 23, 2014 at 19:32
@terdon I'm going to guess, but I think that when he's downvoted, since he doesn't have 125 rep that is necessary to downvote — Braiam, Commented Mar 23, 2014 at 22:25
You can just delete your downvoted answer and will get reputation back after a short time delay. — Danatela, Commented Mar 24, 2014 at 10:32
As others have said the idea seems to be to make posters write quality answers and take the experience more seriously. However I agree with you, because the ideology assumes that downvoting priviledges will be used properly and they sometimes aren't. — please delete me, Commented Jun 4, 2014 at 0:46

Lucio · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-23 21:01:02Z

7

I think that it has been addressed previously (I can't find a dupe), or maybe it is too obvious.

This restriction makes you take it more serious. If you don't like a post, even when it may be useful, you would likely downvote it just because.

IMO it is a perfect policy that doesn't need to be changed.

At the end of the day, as Eliah says:

if a post isn't useful to anyone, we certainly should downvote it!

answered Mar 23, 2014 at 19:15

Lucio

19.1k13 silver badges21 bronze badges

Is this really why? Serial downvoting is automatically caught and reversed by the system; in the rare cases that it isn't, posts can be flagged for moderators who can look into it. Furthermore, the rep loss for downvoting is very low--once someone has a couple thousand rep, or even a couple hundred, the -1 for downvoting someone else seems mostly symbolic and I have a hard time believing it would deter anyone who is already willing to break the community's social norms and rules by targeting another user with downvotes.
– Eliah Kagan
Commented Mar 23, 2014 at 20:50
The lose of reputation make you think twice. Whit that in mind you won't be voting every single post that you don't find useful, but you will use that power with poor quality posts.
– Lucio
Commented Mar 23, 2014 at 20:53
2

That seems like a totally different (and far more plausible) reason for the system to take away -1 from downvoters, than the reason given in your answer above. After all, a user who downvotes many, many times per day is still not serially downvoting unless they target a specific user with the downvotes (rather than distributing them based on the content of posts they dislike). With that said, if we think a post is not useful to anyone, we certainly should downvote it!
– Eliah Kagan
Commented Mar 23, 2014 at 20:54
Yeah, now that I read it again I think the same. I explained it on a different (wrong) way. Edited!
– Lucio
Commented Mar 23, 2014 at 20:56

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