Having surfed reddit for several years, I've always had the impression that its voting system cannot handle controversial topics well. Although it's an official rule that comments shouldn't be downvoted in disagreement, downvotes are very often used that way. This sometimes leads to less "valuable" content being on top of threads, for example jokes.

I think that it's beneficial for discussions to have good controversial opinions in higher positions as they are now on reddit. But I understand that people want to state their disagreement and don't always want to comment to do so. Also, I think many disliked that the public upvote/downvote counters were removed.

Something that could help with all of that would be a disagree button for each comment together with a counter that shows how many people clicked that button. The button wouldn't have any effect on sort sequence.

What do you all think of this?

Edit: Added clarification that there wouldn't be an effect on sort sequence.

Hey all,

One thing I always hated about Reddit was that a -20 post could have a +500 response, but the entire comment tree would be placed at the bottom of the thread.

I think it would be very cool if the value of child comments bubbled up through to the parent comment for the purpose of sorting.

Pros:

High quality responses to low quality posts would be more visible

Posts that provoke more discussion would be sorted higher than ones that don't, and posts that provoke high quality discussion would be sorted higher than low quality joke threads

Cons:

High quality posts that didn't provoke a lot of discussion might be pushed down

Probably abusable with coordination between multiple users

I apologize if this has already been planned or suggested before.

Thanks,

Urs