It's true that criticism deters new users much more easily than established users, but I think losing established users is orders of magnitude worse than losing new users.

That old familiar post you linked discusses karma, and I think karma has evolved to be something very different from what it was intended to be. Almost nobody has a happy trigger like that. You can't simply dictate what kinds of signals voting is supposed to send because it will acquire new meanings by usage, and stubbornly going against the grain is going to send unintended signals to people.