Die troll, you don't belong in this world!

It was not by my hand I was once again given life. I was created by humans who wished to get attention!

Attention? You steal peoples time and make them angry!

Perhaps the same could be said of all forums...

Your words are as empty as your soul! Mankind ill needs a thread such as this!

What is a thread? A miserable pile of upvotes. But enough talk... Flame on!

vs

Here's my opinion.

I don't like upvoting/downvoting. I'm utterly confused on when I SHOULD use them. Should I use it on things I agree or disagree with? Things I enjoy or dislike? Inappropriate content? Things I want to get attention?

I've seen tons of people using it every above way but that's too much. I've gotten a bad habit of ONLY looking at things upvoted and then ignoring anything downvoted because they must be wrong. People share their opinions but then people go and share their opinions about their opinions not by posting their opinion, but having their voice heard by up/down votes.

How it should be:

Upvotes should be the only thing that exist. Downvoting is used too often as a negative assault on somebody with maybe unpopular opinions (maybe Naut is OP, don't just downvote blindly). It would be better off using upvotes only to point something out as good or important. The biggest fear people have is their opinion not being seen because people will blindly downvote anything they don't agree with. They SHOULD be upvoting what they agree with and then having a constructive argument with the other opinions instead of bullying them out of sight.

From what I've seen the proper way to use downvotes is to flag spam or porn. I'm pretty sure we have a flag inappropriate content button. That's good. That means we can get rid of spam or anything else through proper moderation. When you give the community self moderation tools by downvotes it isn't good. A thread gets closed because it had too many downvotes. Does that mean it was a BAD thread? Not necessarily because the community is deciding "This thread shouldn't even be bothered with, lets downvote it till it goes away." The thread itself might have a point, but because the community decided they don't like the posters opinion and then that means the poster can't share it anymore unless they reopen another thread (which begins a spam war).

If you provide a way to get what the community wants up and front, the "Best" tab, by the community upvoting what they want, you still get that advantage of upvotes. If you get rid of downvotes and just replace it with moderation you get the advantage of everybody getting to share their opinion. That's important.