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Comment by Leonard_of_Q

8 days ago

Voting combined with voting on the votes/voters worked quite well in the olde days of yore when Slashdot used such a system. You did not 'vote up' or 'vote down', instead you voted things like 'insightful' or 'overrated'. Some of those categories caused the vote count to go up, others caused it to go down. Users decided for themselves whether they wanted to see all posts or only those above a given threshold. Then there was the meta-moderation system wher a rotating cadre of users could flag abusive votes. If a user got too many sch flags he lost his voting rights. This latter system would be good to have here as well given that I've seen a lot of abuse of the down-vote button where all recent posts for a user who has voiced an opinion outside of some desired narrative get voted down no matter their subject. Such abuse would be caught if there were a meta-moderation system in place. It would help reduce the group-think which is seen on sites like HN and Reddit.

A similar voting system is - or was - in place on lobste.rs where a reason for voting down needs to be given. It does - or did - not have meta-moderation though which takes away the possibility to get rid of vote-abusers.