I think that strikes to the heart of why I question the value of keeping downvotes.
Without a clear guideline, it's a mixed signal.
Since that signal can be suppressive, it seems to me like in its current state, it detracts from open discussion.
I am against the use many people give it to silence people they disagree with, but the problem is, what's a good alternative UX?
I think keeping the functionality while presenting it as something different than the opposite of the upvote might do (maybe use an alternative counter, too?), but on the other hand it seems to just overcomplicate things.
The functionality as-is might not be perfect, but it might be better than any alternative I can come up with.
Sorting would be at sibling level.
I think it's useful for it to have an opposite action, but then that would mean we have votes for sorting and separate votes for graying out. That seems needlessly complicated, which is what I meant.
Upvotes may cause the post / comment to float up in relation to it's siblings, but that's about it, other than flagging.
I also think it would be interesting to have a separate agree/disagree signal that's independent of quality rating.
I can disagree strongly with a well thought out and quality comment, and vice versa. It would be nice to have independent signals, so I could conveniently communicate "I disagree with you, but value the discussion"
Most of the time, we can't know people's ages from their comments, so your apparent conclusion that this is age-related confuses me.
> This might be their first “adult” conversation, so to speak, and the idea is not to squelch them but not to drag down the general tone of discussion either.
In the adult conversations I've had, people generally show enough respect to give equal weight to all appropriate contributions to the conversation. Dismissively silencing a participant with no explanation is something more exclusively seen among children.
> the psychological impact of the downvote.
I wouldn't call it a psychological impact. It's just a surprise we all get over. The surprise comes because we seemingly are having a good conversation going as we might in real life. However, the casual graying out seems like a big disparity with etiquette in face-to-face conversations.
Personally, I understand it's just a difference that comes with the different medium.
The way I see it, flagging is for inapproriate comments like something containing porn, or indisputable hate speech, etc. Graying out is for comments that are not inappropriate but have low signal-to-noise ratio, like "That's cool!", or that go against the guidelines. Upvoting is for conversation subthreads one is interested in, to get them higher and hopefully with more participants.
Use of the upvote and downvote are not standardized though, so people use those buttons with different reasons. Same happens with StackExchange.