across a variety of modern up/down vote based platforms, some make it a personal mission to avoid downvoting (the only real exceptions when someone is being utterly objectionable, ie. ridiculously racist/sexist etc or blatant spamming (1)
in general, it is almost always better to have a respectful discussion than mindlessly downvoting and moving on. if two parties can meet for respectful discussion the outcome is almost always superior to the text-book divisiveness of a downvote war etc (2).
in a great many cases people usually find they don’t disagree as much as previously thought, have their mind opened to a valuable new perspective, or at worst accept to disagree respectfully. definitely a better outcome.
yes it is time consuming, but don’t we all generally want quality over quantity?
(2) the original idea of a self-moderating community through up/down votes is a good idea, yet appears to have been hijacked by the modern social-media-type weaponised web, which is being turned against humanity to divide and polarize us against eachother. and is particularly suspectible to bot manipulation.
(1) which can have eg. their own flags
That would have the unfortunate side effect of increasing negativity, as people are pushed to actually voice it instead of giving a harmless downvote. And when you consider the extra effort required, the downvote itself essentially becomes meaningless, turning this into a mechanism of “if you don’t like it, make sure to let everyone know why, or shut up” which I don’t think is very helpful.
That said, maybe something like adding an extra step where you choose a reason for the downvote from a list like “spammy, offensive, rude/toxic, annoying, misleading/innacurate” etc. or write your own, and those could be visible to moderators (anonymously) as a sort of micro-report. Would dissuade people from mindlessly downvoting and help improve moderation in the process.
Also I often think people easily tend to downvote things just because they disagre, even though it might be constructive content. I have at least caught myself doing that before.
This sounds like an excellent idea & the perfect compromise. As outlined in 1 of the OP i think spam/toxic/offensive could have their own flag. But definetly inaccurate etc could be a perfect compromise.
Definitely another good idea, the only possible exceptions might be if a user is just spamming the wrong reasons merely to keep downvoting mindlessly, it may be good for mods to have a way to detect that. As it it could indicate possible bad faith and especially possible bot manipulation.
I agree with the mechanisms you’ve described here, except that I wonder if it might actually help rather than hinder. If people are entering mean things then it would increase the negativity, but if they’re voting for mean reasons then isn’t that that type of behaviour we want to weed out (and possibly even discount such a downvote for such mean reasons?).
And if they’re providing respectful, helpful criticism then I don’t think that is increasing negativity, but potentially makes a net positive overall.