I propose that we should have some sort of bar to allow downvoting.
We seem to have a certain user who has been doing literally nothing but downvoting.
While this is little more than an annoyance. There's nothing stopping a herd of goats from showing up and manipulating the front page of our quaint little corner of the internet.
It's not the loss of imaginary points that I care about, it's the lack of visibility for the posts themselves.
I agree defining participation, or perhaps desired contributions to the community is very delicate. I would hate to see it based on crude popularity like on voat. Denying some people the right to downvote is restricting their free speech in a sense, and I hope you'll be very careful to divorce this as much as possible from the popularity of their ideology. Try basing it on the age of their account, the historical regularity (not intensity) of their site activity, the number of posts/comments with greater than 5(?) upvotes (ignoring downvotes)... there must be fairer ways.
If your first problem is too many downvotes, a more gentle step could be to limit everyone's downvote to upvote ratio. Only the heavy handed users would even notice, and the solution is directly related to the perceived problem without any other judgement of the individual involved.
How would we define participation? I like the idea of basing it on participation more than your amount of phuks taken, because you can lose the ability to downvote if you're brigaded. Then again, if we're basing it on the amount of posts/comments, its still pretty easy to get an account that can downvote.