Comment by altairprime

People will just flag content that is compliant with the guidelines if you take away their downvote option, and flag reasons are already inbound someday. I rarely downvote and asking me to provide reasons (which would only be visible to the mods, same as flag reasons and in alignment with the ‘no accusations in public’ guidelines) would drive me to downvote more, since it would invest more weight into my opinion. Typing “This is a generic copy-paste of a rabble-rouse / talking-point that is unconnected to the post it was pasted into, and should be detached from the top thread and downweighted to the bottom of the discussion just above the blatantly-offtopic replies” is infinitely more attractive a downvote to submit than just clicking an arrow. I feel I can say with some certainty that the outcome would not be what you desire, but instead would result in a sea of downvoting that helps the mods identify and target uninteresting and bad faith participation (that often earns upvotes for also being popular or witty!) while leaving legitimate controversy alone. Though, I suppose, after a year of that, sitewide downvoting would decrease as users earn algorithmic quashes for their valuelessness. One can dream.