The upvote system is way too rudimentary to work efficiently. The upvote incite people to post to become more popular, not to post more interesting content.
One metric is not enough, the upvote system combines both "funny" and "interesting" in the same metric. Soon it's the funny content that is pushed to the top, because it's a more common characteristic. But this is how you get memes, emotional and basic screenshot of tweets to the top of the frontpage. And this is probably what you don't want.
So either we add more type of votes,for example two arrows, like an arrow "interesting" and another arrow "funny" or we get rid of them, leaving only the "report" button.
Get rid of reputation too. Some people are already chain downvoting in rage. What good do you think will happen out of a reputation score? People will just spit on you. People are emotional, don't put a gun in their hands.
"The downvote is useful to get rid of antivaxx"? You have a report button for that. And while the downvote button gets rid of antivaxx, it pushes memes to the top, destroying the platform itself. The benefit of the downvote button doesn't compensate for the flaws of the voting system.
The best way for an antivaxx to get his content visible? It is to get blocked! If he is blocked he cannot be downvoted anymore afaik. So it's all good for him. Even the block system doesn't really work as intended and has nasty side effects. Because yes, you won't see it, but other will, and they will adhere, and they will upvote and post more antivaxx stuff, and inspire more antivaxx people.
And I'm not even starting with the bots and scripting systems, which will detect who downvoted you and will "revenge downvote" for you. Do you want all your post to appear with a starting minus 5 attached to it because you posted about veganism 3 months ago? That's what you will get. All it takes is 5 people who don't like the way you talk, and a script. And all your posts will go down the drain as soon as you post them.
--> The system need either higher granularity or we need to get rid of the voting system, and keep only one button: "report", with a mandatory 60 characters comment with it. <--
You don't. You sort by themes through the magazine system. And you report what is clearly troll material. The current vote system is too easy to exploit.
If an instance is limited in the number of participants then we should be able to avoid the flood of random content that we saw on a single instance system like reddit. Don't forget that your vote only count for one and people in their majority prefer to laugh rather than to read or post interesting content. For now it's fine, but as more people shows up the problem will become more apparent.
Anyway we cannot keep only one metric to sort different kind of content. At least the downvote button should be removed, it's a source of abuse.
I fully agree that downvotes is a negative. I'm not trying to be punny either. We want quality to take off, but we don't need downvotes to signal anything from disagreement to disinterest to trolling. Just report trolls - and if enough people report, it could be temporarily hidden till a moderator reviews it. Of course, this can be abused, too, but if reports aren't visible and the threshold is set reasonably, it could be better than what we have had.
You know, this just made me remember.
Upvotes don't actually count for the sorting algorithm, at least not yet. It's all about boosts still (despite reputation being changed by now in that regard).
Even with the system currently used for reputation, keep in mind that boost also acts as a second upvote (actually two upvotes iirc, so it's more powerful than a regular upvote).
I'm not sure this is true anymore. Ernest posted about this yesterday, I think. Upvotes are now considered and boosts counts as two upvotes.
For reputation, yes. The sorting algorithm is different. If I go to all -> top, it's still most boosts = highest. If you actually calculate upvotes+2*boosts you get a different order.
Like, 642 upvotes + 2*564 boosts (1770; 1730 with downvotes) is higher than 1198 upvotes + 2*335 boosts (1868; 1853 with downvotes).