[dunnevens]

The easy counter is to stop graying out downvoted posts. An even easier counter is to get rid of the downvotes entirely. Have a reporting system to take care of the rule-breakers. For everyone else, bad posts will generally not be upvoted and will thus lurk in the bottom of the page. Underneath all the upvoted comments.

That’s not perfect but I think it would be an improvement over the current system. As an added bonus, it would eliminate the “why am I downvoted” noise.

Slashdot had a nice system back in the day. People were randomly selected to rank posts. You had to give a reason (from a list) for your ranking. And posts would max out at 5 points or have a floor of -1. Maybe that wouldn’t scale to Reddit but it was a fairly humane way of doing things that was a bit resistant to mobs and bots.