Get rid of down votes

Yah Reddit puzzles me, I stay off of it.

I completely understand your second point, but think of it like this -- 7/7 people agreeing so much that they HAD to upvote is pretty outstanding, and would translate to a 1000/1000 upvote to viewer ratio. I really don't think that would happen, because the trend would be impossible to achieve. That makes it an outlier that I really can't help but ignore simply because it won't happen. And if it did happen, well, then that topic had to be very badass, and therefore deserves it, and stays in line with the idea that the upvote system works.

I'm saying that, as a generalization, upvotes are not inherently bad. Downvotes, conversely, add an almost certain amount of negativity that doesn't foster healthy community behavior.

If there is a stipulation that all comments have to have substance behind them, then a "report button" which hides the content would do the same thing as "down-voting into oblivion." However it wouldn't have the negative effect of being involved with people disagreeing on the opinion.

As to your second point, I believe there is a way to know how many times a thread has been viewed on a forum. All you have to do is look at how many people opened the thread and compare that to how many people up-voted the idea. It isn't difficult to see that a thread with 1000 views with the op having 7 up-votes and the person who countered his argument having 500 up-votes, what the more popular idea is.

That's a pretty big assumption. I reddit all day.

If someone makes a comment that says "I think Zac's revive passive should be removed," and it has 7 upvotes and 49 downvotes you can tell it's not a popular idea. However, if it's just 7 upvotes, then you have to wonder is that 7/7 people that liked it? 7/1000 people?

Without downvotes you'd just have a comment in reply that argues against the idea, which would get more upvotes than its parent. You're also talking about using downvotes as an 'I disagree' button here, which goes contrary to reddiquette and is exactly the problem with having downvotes at all.

The point of downvotes is to more quickly remove content that doesn't contribute. However users will always tend towards just downvoting things they don't like for whatever reason. People constantly downvote posts that do contribute just because they don't agree with it. Most people don't care one bit about rediquette. That is the big downside of downvotes, they stifle productive discussion – either you agree with the majority, or your posts get downvoted. You see this on reddit every day.

Er, does that not fall under 'trolling' to you? Seems perfectly downvote-worthy according to what you yourself specified up above.

Regardless, however, hopefully the community wouldn't suddenly find such statements worthy of massive upvotes and it would be at the bottom regardless since it wouldn't have been given any attention.

Editing in my reply since, for some reason, I can't respond to the below:

It was just an extreme version of an opinion that brings nothing to a discussion, and why we should be able to downvote them to effectively remove them.

Yes, and I agree those are totally legit to downvote! Statements that don't contribute to a topic at all are on par with off topic discussion. You seem to be thinking less falls under "off-topic, trolling, offensive, spoilers, etc." than I do.

Also, what if that comment was a reply to the very top comment in the thread. Now, even with 0 upvotes it is higher than the second-most upvoted reply in the thread.

That's still true of Reddit- downvotes don't change that, they just filter it faster. I'm not saying that a filtering system shouldn't be in place to hide/minimize posts that have been ignored for X amount of time, or responses after X time has passed- reddit has that as well. See the "load more comments" link at the bottom of large comments/threads. Downvotes aren't necessary to make those work.

A reward system would strictly be cosmetic and add nothing to your league account, RIOT's very good about not introducing new horrible features. But it's neither here nor there.

But why have downvotes when you can have spam filters? I mean, really, a troll thread would be spammed and shot down by the community anyways right? Which leaves us with bad or troll posts. Why not spam those as well? The idea you are giving is that downvotes help moderate, and that is a hell of a point. I should clarify however, the main point of this thread is really the idea that downvotes aren't used as a moderation tool as well. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and everyone should be able to have discussions and arguments. That is perfectly fine, and in that sense, I would not add a downvote feature. However, there are posts and threads that do not add to the discussion and can derail or make an argument worse. What do we do? Downvote it? If so, the downvote feature is now inappropriately used because a downvoted opinion is synonymous with a troll thread or a troll post through relativity.

My suggestion is to keep an upvote system, and on the opposite side of the post completely away from the upvote button, add a "spam" or "report" button. This can help remove the association between wanting to downvote as spam and downvote as disagreement. Why? Because now, in order to disagree, you say so with a written post that is more well understood. In order to "down vote it to oblivion" and hide it, it is down so without confusion.

The main idea is that downvotes have more purpose than necessary and can be confusing and used inappropriately.