I remember when I first joined that I really liked how people who disagree here do not downvote but rather challenge you through a comment. It was a nice change from reddit...
But times have changed and people love to downvote here these days.
I think hacker news does an ok job at mitigating this by not allowing you to downvote until you reach a certain amount of karma.
Obviously that creates its own problems but at least you have to have a little bit invested in the community before you can start trying to dictate the conversation.
But times have changed and people love to downvote here these days.