Ask HN: Is there a better way for HN comment voting to work?

I really enjoy the conversations I see and engage with on Hacker News. However, the way that downvoting works seems to miss an opportunity for more productive discussion.

I often find that something I've said is downvoted, and I have no idea what objection they could have (e.g. I am sharing a personal experience without a value judgement or opinion).

One potential solution I've thought of is to require users to either upvote a reply, or write their own, before they may downvote a post.

I'm interested to see what other solutions could be considered for this issue. Maybe some people are abusing the feature as a form of "double upvote", and maybe solving that some other way would be less heavy-handed.