>There are plenty of questions where the most upvoted answers is wrong or out of date. Of course -- because no system is perfect. Your proposed mechanics for

>There are plenty of questions where the most upvoted answers is wrong or out of date. Of course -- because no system is perfect. Your proposed mechanics for designing discussion forums isn't perfect either. It's about tradeoffs. I don't expect perfection with SO's top-voted answers. Instead, I'm more realistic about the probabilities of the top answer being more useful than the bottom-most answer. Relying on probabilities is a much better usage of my limited time than reading every single answer from unvetted users for every single question on SO and mentally sorting them myself. >For a sight like HN/Reddit I think it might be ok if there was an upvote, no downvote, From a statistics perspective, the downvote mechanism helps with the spread[1] of the scores. Instead of just 2 states of 0 or +positive; you get 3 states of -negative, 0, +positive. That way, 0 and negative being won't be in the the same "undifferentiated category". Again, it's about tradeoffs instead of perfection. Your proposal tries to stop "toxic" downvotes at the expense of asking readers to wade through more undifferentiated comments (which is arguably another form of toxicity from the readers' perspective). (Arguably, there's a 4th category on HN which is "flagged" which goes beyond the downvote.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion