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.)

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

I made a post on SO Meta[0], where I shared a bit of wisdom I learned from teachers:

"Encourage the person; discourage the behavior."

Seems to have received lukewarm response, but it may be an oversimplified approach to a complex issue.

"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong." –H. L. Mencken

[0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/398537/what-can-we-...

I agree that upvotes only would make for a better dynamic with less mob abuse. And, if someone is mean or makes a dumb contribution, being completely ignored is a good lesson, much better than a shower of downvotes without any reason

> being completely ignored is a good lesson, much better than a shower of downvotes

Downvotes directly lead to a post being ignored, because they get greyed out and eventually die. I consider that a great self-moderation feature. How would you replace that?

Upvoted comments going up the page and ignored ones dropping down so one has to scroll all the way down to see them.

I remember a lot of people, myself included, questioned Facebook's "like" system when it was introduced because it had no corresponding downvote. I think I agree with you now though.

That doesn't work, because posts with zero upvotes get the same screen space and framing as posts with 25k upvotes.

This is an editorial issue, because those upvotes are decorative. They suggest a post has more reach and engagement, and perhaps is more entertaining. But not that it has more objective credibility - which is of course a reflection of Facebook's preference for promoting the former over the latter.

Voting isn't the answer. There may not be a community-sourced answer, because any system you imagine can be gamed by any more or less organised adversary.

The only workable solution is manual moderation with some attention to tone and content, and the banning of those who consistently troll.

Possible alternative: downvotes that don't affect placement, and just have an additional downvote counter.

I've sometimes wondered about a lifetime upvote/downvote counter as an alternative to upvote karma.

This would work in a secure community, but it will stop working as soon as astroturfing PR firms and state troll farms move in, because on most sites it's trivially easy to create downvotes bots to attack specific names.