1. Upvote/downvote is often misused as "Agree / Disagree" and "I like you / I don't like you" rather than "Positive contribution, I learned somehing / negative contribution, spam, ad-hominem, rude, etc." HN is actually mostly good about this, but this effect is quite shamefully pronounced on places like reddit, and is in part what gives the label redditor its negative connotations. See /r/politics for the most jarring misuses of upvote/downvote.

2. Downvotes in particular are too cheap. I think it'd be cool if a downvote were accompanied and weighted by a comment: for each downvote, you are prompted to also leave a comment explaining yourself. If your explanation is insufficient and downvoted too much, your downvote is discounted. You'd still get ideological misuse per point #1, but it might improve things.

One mechanism covering both "I agree"/"your post made me feel good" and "factual information"/"contributes to the conversation" means neither one is represented well, and because most people are driven mostly by emotion, the signal you get is basically "how many people did this post make feel good"/"how many people did this post make feel bad".

This is not specific to politics, despite your framing. This happens all of the time on HN with technical topics, too.

Stack-wars or favored technologies is a good example.

What does a downvote indicate? I have never understood.

Does it mean:

1. I don’t agree with you

2. Your post is spam

3. I don’t like you

4. You’re factually wrong

5. Your content made me upset or sad

6. This doesn’t contribute anything

All of these things are better served as a reply or not vote at all.

Karma doesn’t really give you much. When you see a post you’ve made get -n votes, what are you to think? Are you to change in some way?

Some different implementations of voting that I would like to see tested are:

1. upvote only. Let the bad stuff filter to the bottom.

2. gas. Assign a cost to upvoting or downvoting. Especially with downvoting and flagging. Require the user to really think about what they want to downvote. For example this cost might be: a point system of which you get limited number of points per time period, or more interestingly you loose an upvote for every downvote.

3. Back off times. One cannot mass cast votes.

4. Votes are public.

5. Downvoted require a comment.

Yes to all of it. pg decided years ago that if it was permissible to upvote for any reason, it was permissible to downvote for any reason. All that matters is that signal gets separated from noise - by any definition of noise - as aggressively as possible.

Also downvoting is preferred to replying because replies tend to either lead to arguments or else pollute the thread with uninteresting tangents.

In my experience, if you manage to get more than two downvotes and it persists, or you've been flagged, it's obvious why. Everything else tends to either be corrected or else settle at 0.

For me: 2,4,6.

You don't contribute anything or you contribute something wrong, other people might think the point stands.

I think it's one of those "worst system except for all the other systems" situations.

You can't really have any kind of discussion forum with highly polarized groups.

For a roughly aligned group, it lets good comments rise to the surface, though doesn't guarantee all will rise.

I think more important is keeping a relatively aligned group, smaller number of people, and some benevolent dictatorship to keep out the riff raff.

It's a lot like democracy, it only really works when people mostly agree anyway.

Wisdom in the population too seems to follow a power rule. There are only a small number of wise people around, and there is a large number of unwise, and many times malicious and crazy people around (with voting/speech rights). Consequence is: mostly the unwise/average things float to the top, reflecting the (interests and biases of) majority.

I would like a reason with a downvote. If you don't agree with me, fine... but if it's something else, I want to know. Not having a reason leaves things ambigous

Pandering, and it's flip side stubborn contrarianism.

Discussion that's rewarded tends towards groupthink or the opposite of groupthink, something like automatic gainsaying.

What are the pragmatic alternatives to upvote, downvote or flag ?

Tagging, upvoting and downvoting users. Vetted power users. Voted on tags. Credentials. Payment for visibility. Chronological threading. AI based moderation.

I think that twitter left a large opening for authority based conversation. Twitter was centered around people and what they said while other forums are generally topic centered.

You could imagine hacker news with an idea of "following" and then a news page that consists first of the people you followed.

I think that the next community that is able to promote authoritative speakers and make invisible the uneducated or low status users will be the next one to be big.

Upvoting/Downvoting makes a community the average of their users. Upvoting and downvoting has no answer for eternal september. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I think there are probably ways of manipulating visibility that can out perform average.

A normal, linear conversation. Like traditional forums.