Why are you scared of letting people use your voting system?
Pathetic. 200 reputation needed to downvote a post. Not using this site again.
Is this a worthwhile discussion?
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Hey Josh,
Our voting threshold is meant to prevent spam users or bots from attacking our users to promote their own content above valid, repair-related content. Downvotes affect reputation, and reputation carries a lot of weight in our community. We want to make sure the people who can affect rep are real and qualified.
It is also initially keeps answers from being downvoted purely because they didn’t work in a user’s specific case. We want people to prove their knowledge before dragging other posts down. For this same reason, downvoting actually costs you reputation! So we’re trying to keep it “affordable” by asking users to earn rep and get used to the site before downvoting.
If you think a question or answer is low quality, you can leave a comment and one of our moderators will be around to remove or correct it.
Thanks for contributing! It only takes a few days to earn 200 rep. I hope you stick around.
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Even if you can vote I'd say you are better off correcting someone who misunderstands something. You can usually sort that out by telling them they're wrong and telling them how it actually works. If you use a downvote you use up points and they don't know who did it, nor what they got wrong. It doesn't help anyone in that case.
Whereas if you tell them they are wrong and correct them, it's highly unlikely they will make the same mistake 2 times in a row since they will probably remember. If they do it again then that's the only time a downvote makes sense.
Down voting should be used sparingly...otherwise you end up developing a toxic environment like StackExchange.