[Reelin]

It seems like having only (up / down) conflates at least two distinct messages that a reader might want to quickly express. The "official" one is dispassionately judging post quality for moderation purposes. The "wrong" one is expressing personal opinion of the content.

Many users clearly want to quickly express their personal opinion in a low effort manner and are more than willing to "misuse" the voting mechanism for that. There was a post on the front page of HN earlier today about railroad crossings and blaming end users for (arguably) systemic failures. It seems like the current incarnation of social media runs afoul of this quite badly in all cases I'm aware of.

(I'm reminded of an SO comment by Tim Post about comments being their version of a public trash can and the reputation requirement for them roughly equating to a municipality welding them shut. The result is pretty much what you would expect.)

[amelius]

Perhaps downvoting should require more effort, like solving a captcha.