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by schoen 2966 days ago
Are there any popular systems in which there are separate downvotes for "I disagree" and "I think this is a low-quality, inappropriate, or abusive comment"? Or separate upvotes for "I agree" and "I think this is a useful, interesting, or high-quality comment"?
3 comments

Yeah, some sites have proper reaction systems that let you rate a post on multiple basises. Slashdot's an obvious example, but quite a few forums have such systems too, with the XenForo version having options for:

Like Dislike Agree Disagree Happy Funny Surprised Sad Angry Winner Friendly Informative Creative Useful Optimistic Boring Old Bad Spelling

As well as whatever other options the site owner may have added. So there are systems out there which differentiate between a post someone disagrees with and one that's low quality, and they do make sure 'disagree' is not counted as a like or dislike on the database level too.

> So there are systems out there which differentiate between a post someone disagrees with and one that's low quality,

...which don't actually mean anything in practice because (1) disagreement effects perception of quality, so even honest voters in a system which distinguished the two will still be likely to mark a post that they disagree with as low wuality, and (2) people in practice, given the option, will mark a comment or post in the way that produces the effect they wish to happen to it, so if they want a post demoted because they disagree with it, and the forum offers marks for disagree which don't demote and some other mark which does demote, they choose the latter.

Dunno, never seen this happen myself on most sites with reaction/rating systems. Okay, the list of examples I can remember off the top of my head is only two (Wario Forums, The Admin Zone), but neither seems to have issues with people abusing the ratings system to dislike posts they merely disagree with.

Maybe it stops holding up on Reddit scale though.

Slashdot's moderation system (in theory) is excellent. It is more than a + / - button so I don't see it working in a faster-paced environment like facebook comments. I think the happy, sad, angry, and heart emoji-rating system they use now is probably already maxing out the amount of time a user will spend on rating something.
Many systems have a flag option; although that is usually reserved for abusive or blatant spam comments.