Abuse of downvotes

[LazLong]

It sure seems up voting individual posts can be useful in a forum where the community is very often creating threads meant to pursue identifying
and solving a problem and in our case improving complex technological products.
   
Of course if as @tophneal reports that @fire219 has stated that modifying the "Rep" system is impossible and it can
only be enabled/disabled then I guess any discussion of modification other than removing Reputation voting is moot.