The Accepted Answer from 2009 is stuck to the top and you have to scroll while simultaneously scanning comments and weighing the Submit Date and Up votes.
What you want is a communal Socratic method. Where everyone goes round and round till the community produces a good solid answer.
The site appears to be down right now, but here's an example page on Archive.org [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190828124025/https://wiki.c2.c...
Let’s remember that score is not money, and many people actually do not care if reputation is reduced by automated means (as opposed to someone’s view on their acting). Score is just a raw signal to a participant on whether they did good or not. It never was a “win all the score non-decreasingly” game. If you spend 30% of your 10k on downvotes, it is still credible 7k. And if you gain 10k and see 3k problems, then these are community problems indeed.
My guess is that downvoting costs score only to weed out low-score inexperienced accounts from emotional voting or manipulation. No effort no score. No score no downvotes. –> no effortless misbehavior. That’s it.
lobste.rs does this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobsters_(website)#Downvote_...
For answers, I would also do away with the downvote button, and offer multiple options instead, like: "does not answer the question", "misleading information", "off topic", "outdated", "i don't like the solution", ... .
That would still give SO the capability to sort answers based on some quality ranking algorithm and hopefully reduce the unwarranted downvoting.
PS, this line from the article perfectly captures how I perceive much of Stackoverflow over the past few years:
> “look how stupid that guy is, and look how clever I am pointing that out with my downvote!”