Your introduction is great, I like how you question that there is only one right answer. This always annoys me on stack overflow. The answers are for everybody,

Your introduction is great, I like how you question that there is only one right answer. This always annoys me on stack overflow. The answers are for everybody, the author of the question is just one case. But your mockups confuse me. I think there is more to discussion than just pro/contra. Also I don't see anything about graphs. Did I miss something? On voting I think that just up/down is not expressive enough. When somebody downvotes, I cannot tell if they disagree or just want to tell me that my post is too off topic or has bad quality. We need more choices. But this makes the UX more complicated. Do you have an Idea? What do you mean by discussion going in different directions? The branching that happens in tree comment systems like this one?