In my opinion downvoting wars will be self limiting. In any solution with increased downvoting there would probably be some wars _initially_ as people get comfortable and seek to establishe the new social rules and find the limits of revised expectations.

But ultimately downvoting is costly and they will probably find a better way to work out their differences.

Over time the _threat_ of downvoting may become more important than the actual downvoting, with actual downvotes rarely occuring, but also less abusive upvoting of low-value content (i.e. people self-police more, because they know if they don't the downvotes are more likely to come).

But we can discuss further once @timcliff lets us know more about what he has in mind.

Yeah, I won’t get into any of the details yet, but obviously that will be one of the main factors to consider.