Not to open up a whole other can of worms here, but I've heard people blame Reddit for an influx of downvote brigade types.

Regardless of where they're coming from, I know what you mean. I wish at the very least we'd see more questions or rebuttals or whatever being replied to the posters.

New people (I am one of them as you will see if you go to my page) do not have the ability to down vote. From what I understand, the assumption is that by the time people get to the magic number (currently 500 I believe), they will have been here long enough to understand what to down vote.

I'd say the best recourse we have available is to set showdead to yes. I think it is quite obvious that we are not supposed to down vote things just because we disagree.

I can imagine a system like stack overflow where down voting a top level comment takes away like a tenth of a point from the down voter so if the down voter does nothing but down vote, they'll ultimately lose the privilege.