Academia - On the failure of downvoting

First note that the answer in question has 51 upvotes and 23 downvotes right now. So there is a considerable amount of downvotes already.

The main reason for the discrepancy between downvotes and comment upvotes is probably this:

• Downvoting requires 125 reputation; upvoting requires only 15. So there are just more users who can upvote a comment than who can downvote the question.

• As of this writing, the question is a hot network question. It’s safe to assume that most of its ten thousand visitors come from other sites of the network and thus have 101 reputation (from the association bonus). Therefore they can only upvote and not downvote.

At the beginning, the author of the answer thought it was a good idea (of course he did). Many other people probably thought along the same lines.

Once the possible flaws have been pointed out, some people might still have thought that it was a good idea nonetheless; others might simply haven't come back to the answer to rethink about it; and those who wanted to cancel or revert their upvote would have found the vote locked until the next edit.

I don't think we did anything wrong, after all.