First, please understand that voting is a privilege to users that have earned it. You can give upvote and downvote to any post you want, without telling any reason, at all.

The post is funny? Upvote. The post shows an attempt of research? Upvote. The post is poorly written? Downvote. The post conflicts with your personal view? You can always downvote that!

Be objective, though. If you don't like the post, you can downvote. If you like the post, upvote. The only thing forbidden is voting because you like/don't like the user. The system can recognize that and reverse it.

Second, please do downvote bad posts. This may be a poorly written post (mostly unclear ones), extremely short question or answer, troll/spam question/answer. (and flag them!).

This is by-design, to allow users to differentiate good posts from bad ones.

Third, don't be discouraged by downvote. Downvote just means someone disagree with you, not a punishment. Do evaluate your post compared to the community standard, though. It's a helpful reminder if you gather a bunch of downvote that you might have posted something that the community doesn't agree.

There's a funny post about someone losing a key, that eventually led him to accidentally downvote a post. This means that a downvote doesn't mean much. The world still goes on.

tl;dr Downvote is not the end of the world. Even if it does, we can always build another one ;)

What is the point of the reputation in this site? Nothing!

Well, almost. Rep point actually tells you "nothing" about the quality of a post. Rep point only dictates what you can and can't do in community moderation. Don't get clingy on your rep points. It's just a gamified system so users earn "something" in return of their contribution. It actually means "nothing" in regard to someone's posts (which should be judged objectively regardless of the poster's reputation)

If answers that I can solidly support are downvoted then the reverse is occurring. Yes, but it depends on other factors too!

I visited your answer, and found that it is a wall of text. I'm not someone who downvote because of this, but I know someone does. Maybe you're just unlucky that someone downvote just because your answer is hard to read. Try to play a bit with formatting options that allow people to read your post easier. Bold, italic, quote, paragraph.

First, please understand that voting is a privilege to users that have earned it. You can give upvote and downvote to any post you want, without telling any reason, at all.

The post is funny? Upvote. The post shows an attempt of research? Upvote. The post is poorly written? Downvote. The post conflicts with your personal view? You can always downvote that!

Be objective, though. If you don't like the post, you can downvote. If you like the post, upvote. The only thing forbidden is voting because you like/don't like the user. The system can recognize that and reverse it.

Second, please do downvote bad posts. This may be a poorly written post (mostly unclear ones), extremely short question or answer, troll/spam question/answer. (and flag them!).

This is by-design, to allow users to differentiate good posts from bad ones.

Third, don't be discouraged by downvote. Downvote just means someone disagree with you, not a punishment. Do evaluate your post compared to the community standard, though. It's a helpful reminder if you gather a bunch of downvote that you might have posted something that the community doesn't agree.

There's a funny post about someone losing a key, that eventually led him to accidentally downvote a post. This means that a downvote doesn't mean much. The world still goes on.

tl;dr Downvote is not the end of the world. Even if it does, we can always build another one ;)