Personally, I prefer it when you can rate posts on a multitude of factors, like with XenForo post ratings or Facebook reactions or what not. That way instead of

Personally, I prefer it when you can rate posts on a multitude of factors, like with XenForo post ratings or Facebook reactions or what not. That way instead of the downvote button being used as a dislike button, you can split those into more relevant categories like disagree, spam, poor quality, etc. Same with the upvotes, which can say whether people find the content interesting, creative, etc. As for the other questions? Well, I guess whether seeing votes is useful depends on the community, especially its size and whether the topic is particularly controversial. I have no issues with people seeing who voted on my gaming specific forums, but I suspect a political forum with a similar system will quickly become utter hell. Still, those are my thoughts on it. Categories for upvotes/downvotes should be the norm on any community with a voting system, and votes should only be public if the community can handle it well.