I am not sure there is a fair way to utilise downvoting here at the moment...

Well, I think this suggestion would actually be fair, because any author can avoid the downvotes by simply not using the tag.

I'm definitely not a fan of downvoting in the way that it used to be used here and - I suspect - is still used on Hive. But, there's a big spectrum to experiment with in between all and nothing.

I'd be curious if the curators in the chat that @personz had posted about ever actually used many downvotes. It may be that the mere threat of downvotes guaranteed that they wouldn't be needed very often. It's a shame that we don't have anyone to ask about that.

(BTW, my American spell-checker thinks that "utilise" is misspelled. 😉)