Part of me thinks and I hate to use this term, but sometimes leadership is needed to make choices when their are groups that want to control the narrative and can vote essentially infinite times. I just don't see a way to let the community do it completely on their own when a small minority can outvote the majority.
One idea that Voten had which was one to think on, was to eliminate down votes altogether. Since Voten kind of went downhill, it's hard to say if it would've worked long term, but it appeared to be a positive idea. Instead of a down vote option, they simply had an up vote capability and if you didn't like something, you just didn't vote at all. Then they had a spam button to report a link as spam to a central point. It appeared to be working great until Sully disappeared. All in all though, if the spam votes are monitored by admin and action taken, the system seemed to be a win, win.
I've considered this many times, but downvotes work very well as a spam tool and if they were to be removed and a report spam button used it would essentially be the same thing at this point. Considering the public downvotes and all.
True, but you could moderate down votes and tell folks to knock off the BS - LOL
I think making down votes public solves this issue a lot better than just removing them completely and allows for a better way to moderate things without the admins interaction.
The transparent down vote system is definitely a good innovation here.
(post is archived)