As of right now, it's been exactly 31 days since VS kicked in downvotes, and you can read the original blog announcement about the feature here.



I've found, personally, that this topic is starting to generate a bit of tension and quite a bit of interest among many sifters, so this is my moment to climb on the soapbox and encourage some discussion about this topic. I've started off a really lengthy comment on downvote philosophy on this video's comment section (4th comment).



I encourage you to check that out share your thoughts.
One reason to encourage conversation, in my mind, is to make sure community consensus doesn't fracture into vicious sniping over what should, really, be an innocuous topic.