this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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The problem with downvotes is they're supposed to be used to push irrelevant things down and bring forward the "productive conversation", but...
...it's easier to use them as an "I disagree with you, get lost loser" button, and I feel like that doesn't usually help the discussion. And upvotes already bring up the good comments (although sometimes the most voted stuff is just memes and you miss the interesting stuff).
While you're right that that's a downside of downvotes, I think that it's far better than the alternative.
Downvotes means we have a way to discourage really bad behavior and lets others see that it's discouraged. For example, suppose someone posts something bigoted. It sucks to see those kinda comments (especially when they affect you personally). When those comments are heavily downvoted, it feels better, since it tells you that the views expressed in the comment are not acceptable. It's extremely discouraging when I see bigoted posts with a positive score. Without downvoting, they all have positive scores and it's just "less positive".
It'd be nice if reporting was able to remove such comments before anyone sees them, but that will never be the case. Too many communities don't remove comments fast enough and many more simply won't remove comments unless they're really bad, if at all. Some moderators are bigots themselves and others simply don't have the ability to recognize dog whistles that may be in comments. Or they're not personally affected by the malicious comment, so they can be more easily convinced that if the comment was politely worded, it's acceptable even if it's blatantly bigoted.
To be clear, it does suck that users will use it as a disagree button for comments that are otherwise good, but that is far, far worth it. The presence of downvotes were a major reason why I used Reddit (and now this) while disliking the likes of twitter.
Make it so you have to spend reputation to downvote, people would downvote less for disagree and more for bad content
I like the thought behind this idea but I don't think it's a good solution. It requires having a reputation score, which I think outweighs the positives here. I could also see people trying to play this system in a couple different ways, which is just plain bad for discussion culture: encourage others to downvote something without spending the reputation yourself, or collect downvotes with bait content in order to eat through other peoples reputation.
Would separate votes for agreeing/disagreeing, and separate for relevance work?
My local newspaper attempted "well argumented" and "agree/disagree" scores years ago. Later they removed the "agree" score, and I recall some accusations of orwellian moderation, but I think this is a cool idea that deserves more experimentation.
Also, clearly naming the upvotes and downvotes might affect their usage.
Maybe something like voting "funny" or "useful" etc. like in Steam reviews. That could also help with the meme response sorting problem.