My understanding of downvoting is that it is meant to tag/reinforce negatively any behavior that is not in keeping with what is considered the ground rules or standards of the community. This definition should promote keeping signal/noise ratio high. The definition of downvoting that says downvote=disagree seems to be a problem. There is also some grey area, for example do you downvote claims that are known to be incorrect factually? This is different from disagreeing on matters of opinion. I would say lay off the downvote in that case and consider writing a reply to correct the error.
Maybe there should be a small color coded menu that opens for down votes, to specify the reason for downvoting. That would serve two purposes. 1: it would be slightly more difficult to downvote and 2: the color coded downvotes could be used to paint the text, indicating in which way the comment is considered off the mark. On second thought, painting the text would draw unwanted attention to it, but use the colors somewhere on the heading maybe?
Maybe there should be a small color coded menu that opens for down votes, to specify the reason for downvoting. That would serve two purposes. 1: it would be slightly more difficult to downvote and 2: the color coded downvotes could be used to paint the text, indicating in which way the comment is considered off the mark. On second thought, painting the text would draw unwanted attention to it, but use the colors somewhere on the heading maybe?
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