aye exactly. since voting is apparently a big thing now, if we have to work within it, some ideas might help such as mentioned above where hackernews prevents downvoting replies to you.
some other ideas
permit upvoting but downvotes require a textbox reply (imo downvoting without a valid explanation is just noise, and we want signal over noise right?)
self posts not being upvoted (all posts start at 0)
i really like how lemmy shows both up & down rather than final value on alot of sites
no voting until you ‘earn your stripes’. not perfect, but somewhat helps at keeping voting within domain expertise.
eg. i ‘fucking love science’, but just because an answer feels nice to me on nuclear rocket surgery doesn’t mean my vote should count. let alone be equal to someone with expertise