I'm confused. You think making up- and down- voters public will turns things into /less/ of a popularity contest, and /discourage/ vendetta voting? I think it will make possible people looking at who downvotes their nodes, and put them on an "enimies" list. You can't have reprisals against downvoters if you don't know who they are. Keeping the voters private is essensial to keeping the system about nodes, and not people...

...and I don't think downvoting is that common. There are currently 4,609,507 upvotes and 421,744 downvotes known to the system. That means that about 11% of all votes are downvotes. I suspect that that's about right. Do the nodes that deserve downvoting get downvoted, and those that deserve upvotes get upvoted? I really don't know. There's certianly no way to determine that with something as simple as select count(*) from vote where weight=-1. In fact, there's no way to determine that at all. I can mearly determine if those nodes that /I/ think should be voted on purticular ways get voted that way. I could even, if I wanted to, make sure. But doing so would impose /my/ thoughts on what nodes are good and what nodes are bad, and I that's not what the monestary is about, or what being a God is about.

The voting system isn't perfect by any means. But I think your first suggestion would make things much, much worse. The second I'm not sure about, but I'm beginning to suspect that making downvotes harder to give would result in not enough negitive feedback, and sometimes negitive feedback, rather then a lack of positive feedback, is just what the Dr. ordered.