The flip side is that those of us who tend to have controversial opinions get negative dopamine hits (downvotes, often with no response or retort) and participate less.

I mostly just don't participate in upvoting or downvoting at all (here or on reddit), unless something really catches my attention.

Personally, I still think this is one thing slashdot had right. Random selection of certain established users as "moderator" who could not only give a comment a point rating between 0-5, but also a descriptor (funny, offtopic, etc).

Honestly I miss the slashdot days of old.