The title of this post is "Downvote Pool Deep Dive" yet there is one essential piece missing form this "deep dive". What is the goal of creating any amount of "free" downvotes? I am assuming it is to encourage higher quality content and thus attract and retain more content creators and consumers.

If that is indeed the goal, how do free downvotes help meet that goal?

If upvotes have not been used to meet this goal, what makes anyone think downvotes will?

Have we done a "deep dive" to see what is causing the lack of quality content? Have we even defined "quality content"?

Personally I think that two of the main reasons that the content sucks on here is that there is a huge financial incentive to blindly sell one's vote or blindly vote trade. Another is that those who do forgo the short term financial gains of vote selling/trading and who actually do want to encourage great content, do not have enough time in the day to find it and the site does very little to make it easier to find it. For years all content has been lumped together in one giant stew. Is that how successful sites like reddit work?

Now on top of not having enough time to find quality content, someone who is a "good actor" needs to also spend time finding content to downvote?

I would imagine in programming you look at things from a "problem - solution" standpoint. Define the problem then create a solution. This seems like you are creating a not thoroughly thought out solution for an undefined problem.

Can we:

1. Define the problem
2. Pinpoint the causes of the problem
3. Come up with a plan of attack to address each cause of the problem based on research and experts who have fixed similar problems
4. Implement the well thought out solution