The worst thing to ever exist in modern forums is the ability to upvote and downvote someone else’s comment or opinion. By downvoting someone’s comment, you make their comment less popular. This is a way to prevent people from trolling and saying outrageous stuff unrelated to a post. By upvoting a comment, you can show that person that you liked their comment. This is a way to bring attention to a specific comment.
Now the issue with this technique is that it kills discussion. I no longer need to express why I disliked your comment. I will downvote your comment because I did not like it. You will never learn or understand why I did not like your comment, just see that counter go down. We could’ve had an argument, but by downvoting you, I do not need to give my opinion.
I wish people are not so sensitive to care what people think about their opinions, but sadly a lot of people do care in 2026. By having a lot of upvotes or downvotes on your comment, you can feel good or bad. People do not want to get downvoted, so they stay away from topics and communities where they have a different opinion on a topic. For example, if I think meat is essential for everyone’s diet because it has the protein, I will stay away from vegetarian oriented communities because I will be downvoted a ton. Sometimes even, people will change their opinions and ideas because others did not “like” their comment.
Another issue with this system is that opinions do not have equal weight. Remember the more upvotes, the more attention, and the more downvotes, the more hidden your comment is. Common opinions will be shown more often as a result, and Rare or underrated opinions will be shoved to the bottom where no one will be able to see them. Not only does this make forums much more boring, but also people will never really consider these uncommon ideas.
The final and biggest problem is that it can be rigged pretty easily. If I had four acounts on a platform, I can give four votes to a person. In addition, there could be plenty of bots on the platform that are giving these votes even though they are not real people. Without knowing where these votes are coming from, the votes can be really unreliable.
The Solution
Just get rid of the upvote/downvote system completely, but relying on moderators to take care of issues can be impractical at scale. A good implementation that would solve spamming and trolling is by flagging the comment for breaking a rule, which moves it to the bottom and folds or fade it out. In addition, it will show which user flagged the comment, and which rule did it break for everyone to see. The flagged comments will be able to go to a queue for moderators to review. Moderators can later remove or unflag it. To solve the mass brigading issue that I discussed earlier, owners of a community can decide how many flags do each user get to use. Of course this approach isn’t perfect, but it solves the problems that I discussed above better than the upvote/downvote system.
“A forum should not be place to rate comments, but to engage in discussion.” – Provectus