I think the operative word is "consciously". I think the author's wish is that we devote conscious thought, not merely emotional reaction, to whatever it is we're consuming. Not just what makes me feel good or bad; but rather, whether it is IMO good, or bad, or neither. If it's neither, move on; don't respond, reply, upvote, downvote, or anything else. Just move along. Let it atrophy and don't come back.

If people could do this conciously, we wouldn’t need this article.

I think the author is just asking us to vote more thoughtfully.

Currently, especially on sites like Reddit, the upvote/downvote buttons are abused as agree/disagree buttons and are clicked with little thought.

The recent troubles on Reddit have people talking about alternatives. An old site - one of the first voting based forums - was brought up, Slashdot.

It has an interesting voting system. Only some people can vote - I forgot the requirements. Each post maxes out at 5 points. Often/almost always the post has a label next to it saying why it was upvoted - e.g. Informative, Insightful, Interesting, ... I can't remember the details of the system as I mostly lurked back then as a kid.

Anyway, I think a shift to a more deliberate form of voting might be what the article is advocating.

Slashdot also has a metamoderation system where after you've had votes for a while you are asked to confirm if comments were "Funny, Insightful, Troll etc" which could then lead to people losing the ability to vote for a while for using the votes incorrectly.

> Only some people can vote - I forgot the requirements.

One day you would get on the site, and have 5 votes to spend. If you didn't spend them, they would go away and it would take a little longer to get more next time.

It was a really interesting system. People did act a bit more seriously when they had votes, and there was the metamoderation system for keeping them accountable. It was a little bit complex, but only long-term users would see it, and worked better than any other system I have seen on practice.

So it is an unsolvable problem afterall.

Hardly. I think the point is that you don't even have to play the game: the signals you send could be null as much as they could be something that you dedicate a lot of time and effort toward.