You raise a good point about the downvote button being used on opinions that are different. I think a lot of people on Reddit misused/abused the downvote button. I noticed that many on Reddit would use the downvote button to disagree and often never bothered to engage with the opinion they disagreed with. I think part of the reason for that behavior is because Reddit is highly moderated, and that results in a certain passiveness/ laziness from the user because they would just downvote and then wait for their parent to come clean up the mess.

I like your idea about a happy medium. Perhaps if saidit tailored some s/all subs to narrow the content for posting and discussion, then we wouldn’t need a downvote button. For example, the politics page could be focused around posting new political articles and then discussing them (or something). Then those more extreme views when off-topic could be confined to their respective fringe subs. Maybe if saidit did this, it would lead to higher quality content and discussion for pages that appear on s/all.

Perhaps Reddit’s problem is that it has both heavy moderation and a downvote button which has led to a passive user base. Just a thought.