If you punish moderation, you end up with an unmoderated site. You don't want a million "help. please write this code for me. thanks" posts, as any legitimate question will be lost in the noise and nobody will waste time "answering" (aka working for free) those questions. SO works because it discourages super-low-effort questions and has a lot of moderation (both by official moderators and high-rep users).

High ranking users do not like your proposal! (parent comment is gray at this time)

Edit: wow I’m tired. I read this whole thread thinking of HN instead of SO. Time to go home and rest..

Forums require lots of downvotes to keep out the riff raff making them that precious would be a mistake.

This also makes sense as high-rank users usually have a constant stream of rep coming from their answers/questions.

So, not only do high-rank users have lots of rep, they also gain rep at an accelerated pace (on average).

As for now at least, all operations on reputation are addition-based and therefore commutative: their order doesn't matter, and undoing an operation returns your reputation to the previous state.

With this 1% rule, however, it breaks down. For example, if you downvote someone when you have 1000 reputation points, and then undo the downvote and downvote him again when you have 10,000, it means that you'll lose 9 points for nothing.