Round 2! I'm just going to continue here since there are so many comments and a lot of them are saying similar things.

So first of all, a lot of people are saying WE DON'T WANT A HIVE MIND! People seem to be of the opinion that hive mind = reddit = chaos. Actually a hive mind is just about utilizing many minds in order to achieve something e.g. sorting. The voting system on this website is a hive-mind voting system! That's how it operates whether you say so or not! When you have tens of thousands of users sorting content by voting, that is hive mind voting. Downvotes or not, that's what it is. To everyone saying they don't want this to turn into reddit... the main difference between reddit and snapzu is in the number of users. Askreddit has over 9,000,000 subscribers. I'm a member of many small subreddits and you know what? They're full of polite, intelligent discussion and quality content. But when you take a subreddit that has over 9,000,000 subscribers, chaos is pretty much inevitable. That's not le evil reddit, that's people, and snapzu wouldn't fare any better with that many users. Read reddit's etiquette guide, it seems to be more detailed and at least as noble as snapzu's. And, same as here, it asks users not to downvote based on disagreement or emotional reaction. It works when you have a few thousand users, but it will fall apart when you have hundreds of thousands or millions of users. So to the people saying that downvoting because of disagreement is against the rules, that's all good and well but how do you enforce that? And when snapzu grows and has tens/hundreds of thousands of users, how do you police people's downvoting?

And the person who cited the Boston bombing, the Sunil chaos was not caused by the voices of reason being downvoted. The problem lies more with the fact that people disagreed with the voices of reason, but they would have done so whether there was a downvote button or not. It's complex, and I'm not going to sit here and blame it on one thing or another, but that was people being people. Reddit was just the platform and it would have happened even if the downvote button didn't exist. And another thing that didn't help was the media picking it up and adding weight to it. Reddit is just a platform for a bunch of people to express themselves, it can't really be expected to provide truthful or accurate information, whereas the media should, because the purpose of the media, ideally, should be to disseminate truthful and accurate information.

To people saying that downvotes are bad because they push content down so its harder to see: downvotes just add a little more heft to your voting. But if there are, say, 1000 posts, they have to be sorted in some kind of order. Something has to be in the 1000th spot, and the 999th, and the 1st etc. Provided you don't hide posts with a certain number of downvotes, downvoting won't "hide" content from the users. Whoever thinks that the 1000th post won't be seen because it has been downvoted out of sight... there will still be a 1000th post with just the upvotes/neutral voting system. So you're still pushing some things to the top and in the process, albeit more passively, pushing other things down. I honestly do think that people here have a strange view of downvotes; people tie so much negativity to it, they're upset when they get downvoted. If people were complaining because they felt like their point was valid yet they'd received -50 points, I'd be sympathetic and...

I can see where you're coming from, but there's also a much larger degree of risk involved in being behind the wheel of a car and in control. As I said in another comment "The world health organization claims that approximately 1.24 million road traffic related deaths occur every year, with between 20 to 50 million more people suffering non-fatal injuries". And it's not like, in being behind the wheel and in control of the car, you're the only one who's at a higher risk. It puts other road users in more danger too. Is it fair to have more people die or become injured so that some people can enjoy the romance of being behind the wheel of a car? I think one fairer solution is to have tracks or designated zones for manual driving. Like take a nice stretch of road along the coast and put it aside for manual use, for example; let people drive manually and enjoy the scenery and the feeling of being in control of their car. That way, everyone who uses that dedicated zone has accepted the risks and some poor sod who wants to be as safe as possible in their self driving car doesn't get wiped out by user error in the name of preserving the romance of manual driving.

I think it would be a huge effort to set all of the roads up like that, and, with time, manually driven cars will most likely become less common and perhaps disappear completely. When that happens, it would be a huge effort to change the roads again. I feel like the best way forward is to integrate them gradually, and as new roads are built or old ones are overhauled, maybe include features that accommodate driverless cars better.

The world health organization claims that approximately 1.24 million road traffic related deaths occur every year, with between 20 to 50 million more people suffering non-fatal injuries!!! A lot of these are people in poorer countries, so self driving cars won't fix everything overnight, but self driving cars aren't susceptible to intoxication, fatigue, emotions (road rage etc.), speeding, distractions, texting while driving etc. They should theoretically be able to see and monitor the position of every car/bike/pedestrian in their 360 degree field of view at all times. They should be able to perform much more complex calculations than humans too! And, when all cars on the road are self driving cars, they should be able to communicate with each other which will further increase safety. The fact that self driving cars can and will be safer is pretty much indisputable.