Where people with high reputaion counts... imparted an exaggerated MINUS score on a single down count

this site is a lot more sane than it use to be

True that. I kinda wonder if it has more to do with most of the people who are on here and active these days being ten years older than they were then- older, wiser, bloodied in scores of flamewars.

I'm still waiting eagerly for that hockey MMOs written in HTML with variables...

Hodgman, on 24 Oct 2015 - 04:53 AM, said:
-1's are good for "I don't agree with this" -- but to encourage discussion, it's important to state why you don't agree.
Indeed, disabling down vote would force people to write a post.

It wouldn't force anything. People are lazy. More likely is that there would be no rebuttal at all -- and then the effect is that non-useful comments go uncontested. I agree that some people's (ab)use of down-votes makes it an imperfect solution, but even so down-votes are *mostly* used appropriately -- this is a "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" situation, and throwing them out entirely would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And for what exactly? To spare our egos the occasional slight?

I also think down-votes are useful as a way of expressing disagreement with a post without dragging the thread into a conversation about why the post is bad. We really don't need another thread that descends into One-Righteous-Defender-of-Noble-Singleton vs. Literally-Everyone-Else. People should be free to forward novel or controversial viewpoints, but in doing so they really ought to offer a defense of their position that's relateable to the question at hand. Otherwise you're just making unsubstantiated claims, which aren't useful and detract from useful conversation.

All that said, we (hopefully) all learn and evolve, so I'd actually like to see down-votes roll off of affecting someone's reputation over time -- say over 6 months, possibly with graduated effect at 2 and 4 months. I think also for this to work we'd want different kinds of downvote to separate between someone who's harmfully spreading misinformation and someone who's commiting anti-social behavior at a level worth rebuking (e.g. responding with personal attacks after being criticized) but not necessarily at a level that needs swift moderator action (I imagine these second kind of down-votes to accumulate in a way that draws moderator attention to acute problems without calling moderator 911, and also to follow the offender for a longer period of time before rolling off, or not rolling off at all.

I'd speculate it's the advent of Stack Overflow that makes GameDev.net less visited.

The overlap between Stack Overflow and gamedev doesn't justify this statement. Stack Overflow is more generic (jack of all trades) and gamedev more specialised. People having issues in the areas of database, image processing, web design, general programming...others... are more likely to visit Stack Overflow. Whereas gaming issues would visit gamedev

I have been here a few months, and am at a surprising high rank already.

Surprised? Why are you surprised? If someone is extremely smart in these technical areas and they spend good time in helping others (including beginners issues- not trivial), what else do you expect? You expect to remain static rank-wise?