The idea of compressing voting down to a single unitless dimension seems like there's a whole lot of information loss going on.

The fact that this dimension doesn't even have an agreed upon unit vector makes it even worse.

There are many dimensions, with different degrees of orthogonality

  true / false
  funny / serious
  insightful / wrong
  kind / hurtful
  agree / disagree  (useful for votes)

I haven't got a clue how a good UX would deal with it, let alone the ranking for display purposes, but I do know the trinary up/neutral/down vote is a big issue.