Let me pitch in,

I don't want to drop qualifications (specially since they are not that impressive and unique), but I think this is a bit important for the context,

I'm an UI&UX planning professional, so my opinions are a mixture of personal opinion, with informed experience and analysis. And since this field of work is ever evolving with global culture, everything I'm about to say is at the same time my professional opinion and an educated guess. That said:

From everything I saw to this day, on the up-and-down voting system there seems to be some sort of bakunian anarchist behavior as a event horizon regarding downvotes. It only works in small circles.

The paradigm of the system is that upvotes are for stuff that contribute with content and downvotes are things that do not contribute with content.

This seems to work on smaller communities; early reddit, niche reddit clones, and to some extent current slashdot;

The problem is that if the system has a premisse that defines itself and it is only upheld as long the users obey it, when the community sphere reaches non-personalization, (that is, when we consider ourselves just a speck of dust in the higher machine), the actions of users seem a bit more inconsequential and the system laws are often disregarded.

What that means is that people start downvoting with things they disagree with, because that's what people do when they are not serious about a system, they revert to individual relevance over infrastructure maintenance. Specially when the downvote button is ridiculously easy to use, and on a semiotics context the go-to button to systematically punish confronting ideas, by morally scoring negatively an idea and systematically pushing that idea out of evidence.

This makes nearly impossible to upheld the downvoting button as a "not-disagree" button.

There you have two options,

Accept that it IS going to be used for disagreement or change the system.

The first case is easy and it is what the majority does, which is mindnumbing, because as stated, it is basically the foundation of the system. So there's a perpetual dissonance in what the system should be doing from what it does.

The second option scares the hell out of people, because people hate to change the foundation of systems,

So in this case, the best option would be to tweak it. See what is wrong with the system and take the edges off to balance the user experience to the intended behavior.

As I said in another post, the Snapzu platform is better than some alternatives because it takes a bit of anonymity of the user. Not that it requires REAL WORLD Id. It's not a binary system.

Snapzu gives people avatars, XP levels, it is invite only (for now), etc...

Those are characteristics that make the user feel a bit more responsible for what ideas his image is professing into the world.

But that is not enough, the downvote button is still shielded by anonymity. (And that's a good thing BTW).

Then we would have to make simple changes on how the downvote button is associated with its proposed function, and the responsibilities that come with the usage.

Then we can have a plethora of suggestion on how to change it, let me give you a few (most have already been echoed in several threads on several platforms for years by many users):

- Make the downvote button NOT the imagetic opposite to upvote, instead of a downarrow and the name "Downvote" something more akin to "Report" "Not Contributing", and changing the forma...

To be really honest, and I may be REALLY OFF the mark here,

But I think GRRM has a big crush on Sibel. He is constantly by her side in cast events and nominated her to Ice Bucket challenge and whatnot.

That may give him some bias to like her character better than ... well... his character.

That said, Sibel did a great acting job on the show and the character, altho completely changed in motto, was really fleshed out,

but,

I do like Book!Shae better, simply because she let Tyrion know that she is doing for the money and ascension several times, she doesn't play much of a mummers farce, but Tyrion is fooled by himself in believing she has deep care for him. She does have some care, but not nearly as much as Tyrion imagines, and in the end, his actions are nothing more than passionate crime, completely unjustifiable in a moral dilemma. While Show!Shae seems to try to deceive Tyrion a bit.

But then, next time he would simply click on "it doesn't contribute to the discussion". Also, this would seem like a punishment.

In those cases I think it's better to behind the curtains, trough programming, not to cast the proverbial downvote that sends the comment down, but flag the comment with a symbol badge of "Highly Disagreed" and keep the comment up.

That way the discussion isn't polar on its visibility and the users that disagree feel that their disagreement was made vocal.

The key problem here is that people will try to downvote what they disagree because that's their only non-vocal action. If you give them a vocal action to disagreeing that doesn't break the intended rules of structuring you may be able to educate the community in the long run instead of looking for workarounds and algorithms to curb the misuse.

IUnder the belief that you can't curb people will to downvote things that they disagree 'd be willing to propose a simple system that work in two ways.

One - Make the downvote just a tiny bit more difficult to cast than the upvote on a two-step procees.

Two - Make the differentiation of the downvote compulsive.

It would work like this:

Once you decide to downvote, a second in-promptu box opens asking you to differentiate your downvote. You would have two options:

1 - I disagree

2 - It doesn't contribute for the discussion.

If you don't select, the downvote isn't cast.

That way the programers could differentiate the relevance of the post, and keep it on the light of day even if a bunch of people disagree with.

And things that are inane, like puns or memes could be downvoted on the bases of contributing for discussion properly.

I hope that the user when facing the written statement of why he is downvoting an opinion will make it harder to try to burry something because you disagree with by lying saying it doesn't add to the discussion, keeping everything more civil.

I can say from experience that the problems are always most likely to come or emerge with popularity. I've been on Reddit since, IDK, 2006? Prior to subreddits, AMAs and gimmicks. The discussion was way better simply because it was a niche culture, a smaller community. Those days the 9gag, buzzfeed and other tribes were all on Digg mostly, and Digg was basically what Reddit is today: "Dank Memes". It's actually weird that I created several of top subreddits when the tool came to beta, and yet, I didn't like the communities and how they evolved and let better people manage it from there.

When Digg flooded itself the exodus to Reddit made things change irreparably. I've been for years looking for an alternative community. But it is not the same, you can't simply go to Voat and expect 'old-time-reddit' to be living there, The cultural mentality changed so much.

But one thing Snapzu has that gives me hope is the similar structure but different organization and layout. The tribes a a lot less secretive and exclusive with the crossposting feature and the personal reputation and presentation options delivered trough a profile page, avatar and "XP" make people consider themselves a bit more like a personality than an anonymous voice, which seems to restrain a bit the impulse from trolling, that is cancerous at best.

So, fingers crossed to this community.