Dislike/down votes have there own for of abuses such as vote brigades.
I'm pretty sure there is not an easy answer to this problem.
I'm pretty sure there is not an easy answer to this problem.
And for sure, it happens. And sometimes discourse suffers for it: good arguments get buried instead of being heard.
Then again, there are much worse things than getting your argument buried on the Internet. And Twitter has some of best examples of this... People being harassed, doxed, threatened, driven out of their jobs, their homes, their communities... All over <= 140 characters that some brigade didn't like and couldn't just downvote.
In a system mostly optimized for pithy one-liners, I'd argue it's a pretty serious defect that a bad joke can so easily escape the bounds of its intended audience and any semblance of context and cost you your reputation. But it appears that's what we've ended up with...
Twitter's userbase has a fine tradition of building social conventions to paper over the deficiencies of the system. In this case, they've reinvented the pillory to replace the hated censor.
Things upvoted by people who vote similar things to oneself are ranked higher for oneself, and things downvoted by people who vote more similarly to oneself are ranked lower for oneself.
This might be computationally expensive, but approximations to it would be cheaper I think, and still give some good results.
For this to work, the UX would need to indicate that a single "vote" means "this is a well-formed or interesting comment" as opposed to the "I agree" upvote or the ambiguous "like."
Overall I think this more closely resembles real-world networks. We are more likely to listen to those we trust, and we are often connected with new friends through trusted parties. We may occasionally interact with those outside our networks, but usually only in passing.
To see why, let's focus on what the problem actually is: we're social animals who crave authentic connection with others, not just to hear but to be heard. We can't just be passive consumers of news but wish to comment on it and be heard and replied to and have meaningful discussion. The problem is that a voting bloc systematically muffles some peoples' speech, ostracising them from the community due to their disagreement -- but then the community becomes an echochamber and fails to satisfy our needs for diversity.
One solution to this has been randomization -- think Omegle etc. -- which works but encourages a different sort of inauthenticity due to anonymity. Another has been the Reddit/LiveJournal model: make it easy to spawn new communities when old ones die out. It's a lot less clear why, say, LiveJournal has mostly died, but probably it was a little too egotistical and people therefore as they grew up got bored with just sharing their own viewpoints without some sort of cohesive blogging narrative, and it just died.
Somewhere there's some room for a solution which batches together communities of 50 people more-or-less randomly with some form of self-selection, and encourages them to talk about some sort of topic-of-the-day that would be relevant to all of their interests. In the meantime our solution is to join a social network and have fun until our community gets too large and we cannot get the attention we crave, at which point we'll swap to another and repeat the process again.