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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Slashdot's voting system generally solves this problem, which is understandable given it was designed in the late 90s; you have a limited number of adjectives with which to flavor feedback (which can be used either positively or negatively), post voting is capped at 5 points, and users chosen at random only have 5 votes to bestow.

Importantly, there's no button that directly maps to "you're wrong/I don't like your argument/fuck you(r account's posting history)"- the only way to do that is to make a counterargument- and if you really feel the need to downvote something, and you have the random power to do so, you're burning an uncommon resource to do it.

It doesn't fully eliminate low-effort sniping (but even removing votes entirely doesn't do that; Tumblr and Twitter arguably have it as a design goal... as does 4chan, in its own way), but that's the cost of being able to distill community sentiment into a simple number-adjective pair (to help outside observers pick up the high points of the conversation and to be able to digest it quickly through auto-hiding the less well-rated posts).