I mean, I'm not trying to say that (even good, unfortunately) Rust criticism will never be at risk of downvotes/flagging; I'm just saying that Rust criticism is not guaranteed to garner downvotes/flags - or at least, not to the extent implied in the particular wording. That's not to comment on your specific situation, either.

> It's not even symmetrical either, because the threshold to be able to downvote is 500 points.

If anything, shouldn't that weigh in favor of comments being upvoted, since there's no threshold to vote something up?

> The way the votes are tabulated is also confusing. It is not one to one. It's like, the downvoted posts contribute more than the sum total of the downvotes, based on the replies.

IIRC the vote display on comments has a floor of -4, but further downvotes continue to affect your karma nevertheless.

I had the impression that there's a bit of the opposite at play as well - upvotes beyond some threshold stop contributing 1:1 to your total karma. Not sure if that's just my faulty memory though.