As shown by a recent challenge, once a few people have downvoted a question (say, three or four) everyone else thinks that they should downvote too leading to incredibly low scores.
I think we need a reform on how we downvote and/or what we downvote on. This will stop people from becoming disheartened by a -8 score.
In many ways, a very negative score means you did something right - people looked at your question. Maybe it was unpopular, but the best solution is to look for ways to improve. This leads to my second proposal:
As shown in the linked question, @xnor left a very helpful comment about exactly what was wrong with the question, an avenue for the question asker to improve. This comment was upvoted by many people. I think this is exactly what should have happened.
I don't think it makes sense to put a limit on the votes of a post -- people vote the way they want, there should not be a restriction on that.
What I do agree with, is that people should change their votes in case a post is edited to resolve specific problems.
If the score is at -5, people should not downvote anymore, and if anyone makes the score decrease, you yourself should return the score to -5 by either upvoting or retracting your own downvote (if possible).
