The upvote/downvote thing was way, way worse when vote counts were shown per-post. That went away years ago and I think the current system seems to work pretty well when viewed through a macro lens. (In the sense of "is this a good community overall?" and "would it likely be worse if the up/down voting were entirely removed?")

I'm on another forum that opted for an up/down vote system and showed counts per-post much like news.yc used to. It created so much drama and anxiety that people were openly antagonistic towards each other over what amounted to fake-internet-points.

The solution the admins came up with over there was "keep the counts shown publicly" but also "make public the specific votes that were up/down on any given post" (with an anonymization of all historical downvotes before the policy change, but not afterwards). Within days, the community adapted and it was a huge net benefit, IMO.

What benefits do downvotes provide over just an upvote sorting the best content to the top and ability to report a link or comment for some greater infraction than difference of understanding?

Downvoting for being blatantly inaccurate or blatantly anti-community seems a worthwhile community-sourced signal for the posts of bad actors (whether temporary or permanently bad actors). This should absolutely factor into the sorting and eventual hiding of sufficiently negative posts.

For people who think of themselves as good actors, I will reflect on posts that attract downvotes and try to figure out if I should have been more constructive on a given post. (I don't "care" about the score per-se, but I do care about the community that I'm part of and if people are telling me that I'm being an asshole on a given post, I should reflect on that, decide if I agree with them, and if I do, to change next time. (Often, I think my content was fine and someone just disagreed and used a downvote to express that. That's not how I use downvotes, but if they do, so be it...))

I like the stackexchange approach, where upvotes count 10x for karma, because no matter how obviously wrong and indecent, we still care for the share of good answers, and more fine grained controls may take care of the rest (sometimes manually). This isn't perfect, 1:10 is an arbitrary proportion, and it might give a wrong impression of being succesfull, and take too long to register as a downward slope; but very importantly, this detaches voting on content that is still immediately visible from karma, that is immediately personal and maybe not that important to other users.

I had a funny incident, where I misunderstood a comment, thinking that "all your answers are negative" was very true, because I often disagree and try to be contrarian. SE has a policy that discourages discussion, so if users find it uncomfortable having their views challenged, when they really wanted an easy answer, howbeit simplistic, that may be lawful.

The situation is different when discoussion is the aim of the game. And it's a bit disingenious to say that SE doesn't have "discussion"; rather, they avoid controversy, heated arguments, or open ended debate.

Anyhow, regarding your comment that downvoting is terrible for civil discours, I agree inasmuch as it's often hard to tell what the downvote signalizes, as it might lump up many different opinions into one false agreement. Say, five different opinions compete, but only one takes on all of the answers and will accrue downvotes for the attacks, whereas the others get basicly ignored by competitors for being irrelevant, but yield feedback so that the vote is really one of popularity, as opposed to ...

Really says something about diplomacy. And I hate it so much.

If you look at hacker news however, a lot of nonsense makes it to the front page. One word titles, clickbait, old links to wikipedia articles, submarine advertising, something no one has heard of announcing a new version, something few care about announcing they are shutting down, a point release of rust, a program that is only relevant because it was written in a certain language, pointless, trivial side projects that only seem relevant to people unaware of the the same idea being done before, etc.

I think a lot of that wouldn't make up such a giant part of the site if there were downvotes on stories.

The downvote/upvote count thing should be informative, and the display preferences based on user's choice. I find the HN practice of dimming downvoted comments downright Orwellian.

You can always click on a faded comment's timestamp to go to its page, where the comment should be in a readable font. I'd love to know what Orwell would say about requiring an extra click, but oh well.

> I'd love to know what Orwell would say about requiring an extra click

He would say probably something along these lines: "The chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of … any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion."

Your "click to read" today is the "buried in page 12 in pt-6 font" of the past. Same train of thought.