Err... What manner of tweaking would solve that problem? Just curious, since to me it seems to be more of a community issue.
So for now it's back to the drawing board-- or rather, vi. I'll write some code to analyze voting patterns and see if there is some way sw could distinguish mean downvoting from e.g. the downvoting of trolls and spammers.
It seems anything that truly merits a -10 is firmly in 'getting killed by an editor' territory, with possible account deletion, and, if there were a floor, anything that doesn't deserve a -10 would not get modded into oblivion for no reason.
Maybe you don't want to change the modding system that much, but I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on the idea?