Good points. Thanks for the explanation.

Encouraging people to ignore instead of downvote is an interesting philosophy that I'm going to ponder more. My initial thoughts when you say "Encouraging people to..." is that people are going to people and if the tools don't support the intentions, people will fight the tools instead of changing intentions. And the long term outcome is a daycare website where admins remove features and mods add rules in a continued attempt to "encourage people" (see reddit) :)

I agree with what you said, but just to continue the discussion: People are compelled to engage with things they disagree with (even more than things they agree with). I think its just a math problem: if there's 3 ways to respond positively (insightful / funny / comment) and only 1 way to respond negatively (comment) then on average there will be 3x more negative comments than positive ones. And people are lazy too so 2/3 of the negative comments will be quick responses (as there's no other quick negative response).

I know I'm new here and am discussing/criticising things at the core of the site but if you kept the "upvotes" and "downvotes" as separate stats (and not subtracted them to get a single "score" or anything) then you can still sort how you currently sort (by "upvotes" or whatever), and also have the quick negative outlet. As for brigade wars, they can still happen in the comment section if there's no downvote button.

I do absolutely love that you broke out upvotes into insightful and funny (as inspired by slashdot) and I think the perfect discussion site would have this as well as for the downvotes (like off-topic, troll, spam). Then you don't even need moderators as the readers can vote and sort/filter themselves (theoretically). But like I said I'm new here, I'll try your system in my search for a new goto discussion site and see how it goes.

Thanks for the clarifications!