I've had some time to experience the new downvoting rules and thought a bit about the whole down/upvoting thing. These are my thoughts:

• Downvoting penalties should get harsher (exponentially?) the more a person conecutively downvotes (similar to the new rules).
• It may be nice to find a way to reduce the prominence of negative nodes. Something like lightening their color or requiring a particular level to view after various stages of --
• Perhaps making both down and upvotes cost a percentage of your own XP some percentage of the time. (You are giving your ++ to others but it grows over time. This last one would be a dramatic change from before so i'm not sure how popular it would be. It may very well hurt the site's popularity.

I'm not saying these changes should be made, just offering ideas that popped into my head to be tossed around.