[Down/Up-voting] Community Use vs Riots Concept

I have spent most of my time reading this board "newest first", but then I got super bored/tired of the reposting of same ideas/complaints/spam/shouting contests that appear in very quick succession. So in an attempt to find some form of filtering out the bad post, I decided to try the Hot filtering.

One of the first Hot posts is from about a year ago and has to do with how bad the community boards are, and contains some pretty strong feedback from both gamers and Riot. This thread helped me understand what Riot meant the voting system to be - a way for very important, very relevant topics to be pushed to the top for quick and easy exposure. It worked for that thread, actually, and was met with response.

Then I noticed the upcoming Canadian RP Price Change announcement and went to read out of curiosity - and realized right away how the community uses the system. This announcement from a Riot employee has several hundred downvotes. Had it not been a stickied topic, the announcement would be shoved to the bottom of the forum, and most likely would vanish from site before people got a chance to see it.

The fact that the announcement was indeed stickied is smart on Riot's part, and is not relevant to this discussion. What IS relevant is that people downvote what they don't like whether people need to see it or not.

I bring this up because it has happened to me. I've had topics in tips and tricks go negative when I ask a relevant question, and have people respond to that post saying they don't know why the downvotes except maybe people saw the title and thought it was just another "whiny bronze topic" without actually reading it. I did manage to get some good help on those topics; never-the-less the downvoting system was still used poorly.

This has also been noted on several other Rioter postings (I remember the name Riot Lyte but I can't remember the topic in question) - but I cannot count how many times I saw comments in other threads directed at Riot Lyte reading "did you not see the downvotes? The community doesn't like it, so FIX IT!".

Again, a poor use of the voting system.

I'm sure there are many solutions, but I may have one myself:

• Remove the arrows from the Topics Listing (so people have to actually "read" [open] the post to vote)
• Have actual buttons on the OP instead of arrows, possibly at the end of the post
• Button 1: Important Topic
• Button 2: Dislike Topic (requires a reason, like when you edit a post)
• Button 3: Suggest Post Clarification (also requires a field to be filled out)

The Suggest Post Clarification would act more like the comments on StackOverflow (as opposed to the answers) and should be notated to lead the user to leave a POST CHANGING suggestion, and not a comment on the topic itself. This is different from the Dislike Topic "reason" in that it allows a user to interact with the topic before upvoting/downvoting. There have been a lot of times I've seen a post that I almost want to push one way or the other but one comment within it makes me choose the opposite.

In conclusion: I've modded several sites in my lifetime, and I am also a web developer/programmer. I understand there are many ways to tackle a problem and that any system can and will be abused. My solution to the discrepancy between what the board's voting system was meant to be and how it is actually used may be solved by using buttons with clearer labels to do the same job, and possibly enforcing users to talk about why they chose to negatively react to a topic in voting.