The upvote system is way too rudimentary to work efficiently. The upvote incite people to post to become more popular, not to post more interesting content.
One metric is not enough, the upvote system combines both “funny” and “interesting” in the same metric. Soon it’s the funny content that is pushed to the top, because it’s a more common characteristic. But this is how you get memes, emotional and basic screenshot of tweets to the top of the frontpage. And this is probably what you don’t want.
So either we add more type of votes,for example two arrows, like an arrow “interesting” and another arrow “funny” or we get rid of them, leaving only the “report” button.
Get rid of reputation too. Some people are already chain downvoting in rage. What good do you think will happen out of a reputation score? People will just spit on you. People are emotional, don’t put a gun in their hands.
“The downvote is useful to get rid of antivaxx”? You have a report button for that. And while the downvote button gets rid of antivaxx, it pushes memes to the top, destroying the platform itself. The benefit of the downvote button doesn’t compensate for the flaws of the voting system.
The best way for an antivaxx to get his content visible? It is to get blocked! If he is blocked he cannot be downvoted anymore afaik. So it’s all good for him. Even the block system doesn’t really work as intended and has nasty side effects. Because yes, you won’t see it, but other will, and they will adhere, and they will upvote and post more antivaxx stuff, and inspire more antivaxx people.
And I’m not even starting with the bots and scripting systems, which will detect who downvoted you and will “revenge downvote” for you. Do you want all your post to appear with a starting minus 5 attached to it because you posted about veganism 3 months ago? That’s what you will get. All it takes is 5 people who don’t like the way you talk, and a script. And all your posts will go down the drain as soon as you post them.
--> The system need either higher granularity or we need to get rid of the voting system, and keep only one button: “report”, with a mandatory 60 characters comment with it. <–
@PabloDiscobar Personally I also like a more granular reaction system (like, funny, informative, hugs, rolleyes, mad etc), like many BBS systems or Discord has. But there’s something to be said for the simplicity of just thumbs up and thumbs down. I remember when YouTube changed its star rating system to a simple up/down vote because the vast majority of people either gave a video five stars or one star. So a more granular system could end up being largely unused.
I have often wondered about whether it might be an idea to have hard limits on the number of upvotes and downvotes a post (and potentially a user) can get. If, for example, a post could only ever get a maximum of (let’s say) 100 upvotes and (let’s say) a maximum of 10 downvotes (and the reputation of a user was capped at, say +1000 and -100), that might still be sufficient for a ranking algorithm to surface highly rated posts and bury low-rated posts, but also discourage people from posting low-quality memes to build up their reputation into the millions. (I think the maximum positive score needs to be commensurately higher than the maximum negative score to reward positivity more than negativity.)
With respect to hiding poor quality content, people could set a threshold level at which a post appears for them. Eg, “show me all post with a rating > 0… or 10… or -10”. or “Hide by default all posts/comments by a user with a reputation of less than -50”. Posts/comments that do not meet that threshold would be collapsed by default.