I think a critical missing context of reposting an old 2009 article is that a newer post in 2011 makes downvotes free instead of costing reputation:

>Jeff Atwood announced change of policy -- "Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”. [...] So, it’s imperative the question list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty for those users who do take the time to read a question and later find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to that." -- excerpt from : https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...

Why? He saw that users were too hesitant in downvoting which allowed bad content to grow and further degraded the site. Changing the downvoting mechanics fixed that.

(I don't know if there's been an update since 2011 to the downvoting system and incentives.)