[waqf]

The harm is that the voting system is designed as a step towards hiding (or at least not highlighting) posts which get downvoted. So downvoting prevents the experience which you yourself agree is desirable, that of seeing both popular and unpopular ideas represented.

That being said, I strongly believe that if a system is being misused, it is the system not the users which are at fault. In this case, my first suggestion (doubtless in need of refinement) is that there should be prominent agree/disagree buttons on every post to allow everyone to express their opinion, and then a separate "flag" link for people to mark spam or useless comments.

[Xurinos]

I think this is a promising line of thinking, the idea that there should be more than one kind of vote. There is confusion as to what the single up/down means, and this is not helped by the fact that the single karma value actually matters for things (the ability to downvote at all or the level of obscuration of the comment). It is certainly not helpful if everyone has a different opinion of what that arrow should mean.

From a UI perspective, there are tradeoffs. Multiple vote options means better sorting, more thorough meaning. It also means more confusion and more work.

Also, instead of single vote tallies, has there been social experimentation with preferential voting systems on comments? (This still has the problem of needing more than one flavor of preference.)

[waqf]

Preferential voting systems? You mean like people voting on whether you or lwhi gave the better answer to my comment?

[Xurinos]

Yeah. But maybe with multiple votes, we already effectively have this. The problem is that those votes are counted internally not as preference order but as total number of votes, adding to a user's general karma score.

[lwhi]

I don't believe the system does hide posts. It creates differentiation between low ranking and high ranking posts.

I rarely ignore the comments at the bottom of a page - in fact, sometimes the least interesting comments are those that are highest ranked.

What's the difference between having upvote / downvote buttons and agree / disagree buttons?

[waqf]

Well, that certainly elucidates your point of view: thank you.

But although the system never makes posts inaccessible (to do so would, I'm sure, elicit complaints of "censorship"), it does, if you're using a normally configured browser, grey out negative-voted comments so that they require deliberate effort to read (by -4, you need to highlight them with the mouse). It moves lower-voted posts down the page: even if you have time to read every post, which many people don't, you probably lose focus and pay less attention by the time you get down there. And it reduces the karma of people who make downvoted posts, which some people probably care about (e.g. because they lose/don't get the ability to downvote) and some people probably don't, but which is clearly intended as discouragement.

I think it's clear that the system is designed with the assumption that posts that get downvoted are posts that it intends to discourage. (And I think it's agreed for purposes of this discussion that spam and useless comments are deserving of discouragement in a way that comments one happens to disagree with are not.)

[lwhi]

I think the voting system probably provides some interesting metrics about users personality types; e.g. whether they have brutal/gentle personality traits etc.

I wonder if this kind of metric is used in ycombinator interviews?