The min threshhold I think is now 500 karma. It's a way to ensure that only people who have been around for a while and understand the community have the ability to downvote, and the rule is only downvote contentless posts (like memes, "+1"'s, etc).
Jasus, i'll never get to 500. Those rules make sense, but the parent comment in this thread had been downvoted despite being correct. Fairly Redditish (the one thing that puts me off Reddit). Thanks anyway.