For the purpose of figuring out what users from different brackets of expertise in the area (judged by their reputation in the tags I’ve attached to my question) is, I think the following way of viewing votes could shed more light on whose votes count more and whose should weigh less in my opinion.
Imagine you could open up a breakdown of votes by brackets of rep within each tag like this:
How to create an instance of a class knowing its name in a string, using reflection?
[c#] [reflection]
Post votes breakdown by rep in [c#]:
0 … 50 rep +2 −7 − don't count towards total score and not visible except here
51 … 500 rep +2 −1
501 … 2500 rep +4 −1
2500 … 10k rep +2 −2
10k … ∞ rep +1 −0
Post votes breakdown by rep in [reflection]:
0 … 50 rep +2 −7 − don't count towards total score and not visible except here
51 … 500 rep +1 −1
501 … 2500 rep +1 −0
2500 … 10k rep +0 −0
10k … ∞ rep +0 −0
This would tell me that users who don’t seem to know (according to their user activity on site, we don’t know their actual level of expertise in every area, but this is what we have to work with) much about [c#] or [reflection] account for the most downvotes, and users who know something about [c#] account for the majority of upvotes. This would give me confidence in my post.
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As for whether/when to display votes from low rep users and how much it costs…
I think everyone (with a registered account) should be able to vote immediately, and those of us who want to see those votes should be able to.
Votes from users who have 0 rep (or unregistered users) should not be immediately visible to others until they register and earn some basic lower threshold of 50 rep, at which point their previous votes become visible to others and start counting towards total post score.
I think showing a non-intrusive message “How can OP improve the post? Care to leave a suggestion?” should be the cost of a downvote, and to make it actionable, don’t limit users to comments only (which can be a hassle to come up with) but also allow one-click reaction icons/descriptions/text votes which could be added to the post instead of text comments. These reactions could be an alternative to canned comments, and contain something like:
- Asked and answered many times before (aka “show your research” but you strongly suspect OP probably didn’t even do a simple search) − this is one of the most common reasons why a post may gain a downvote, andin this case I would recommend changing how users vote by not downvoting but leaving this exact “reaction” as a way for OP to know that their question isn’t “bad” per se, just that it’s not valuable to have it asked here for the 100th time;
- Badly formatted − wall of text, code not in code block, excessive markdown usage;
- Citations needed / authoritative references needed − for when OP says “everyone knows that X” and it’s actually not something widely known;
Also, a couple other reactions to illustrate how else this system can be used:
- Illustrations could be a great addition − this isn’t a “downvote” scenario exactly, but I think it’s a useful to have quick “reaction” for when you don’t want to write a comment with essentially the same meaning;
- Outdated answer − this is unlikely to help anyone in present day, but could have been useful at the time of posting;