That's not likely to help. The author is asking for people to devote more attention to something trivial.
That's not likely to help. The author is asking for people to devote more attention to something trivial.
Currently, especially on sites like Reddit, the upvote/downvote buttons are abused as agree/disagree buttons and are clicked with little thought.
The recent troubles on Reddit have people talking about alternatives. An old site - one of the first voting based forums - was brought up, Slashdot.
It has an interesting voting system. Only some people can vote - I forgot the requirements. Each post maxes out at 5 points. Often/almost always the post has a label next to it saying why it was upvoted - e.g. Informative, Insightful, Interesting, ... I can't remember the details of the system as I mostly lurked back then as a kid.
Anyway, I think a shift to a more deliberate form of voting might be what the article is advocating.
One day you would get on the site, and have 5 votes to spend. If you didn't spend them, they would go away and it would take a little longer to get more next time.
It was a really interesting system. People did act a bit more seriously when they had votes, and there was the metamoderation system for keeping them accountable. It was a little bit complex, but only long-term users would see it, and worked better than any other system I have seen on practice.