Haha, this is sad but true.

Heh, you think it's rough here, try out some of my sub-Reddits.

Upvote/Downvote etiquette is that you upvote anything that's well-written or stated, but I don't really follow that. Typically I'll only upvote comments I agree with, regardless of how well-written a post I may disagree with is. I only downvote comments that are legitimately breaking the rules, flaming or trolling, etc. 

Personally, I really dislike the system, since it's so easily abused. I usually favor giving that power to admins or moderators rather than to a mob of downvoters.

Thankfully, people use their voting powers wisely. Like giving tens of upvotes to someone who calls another user an "imbecile" for expressing a different opinion.

People downvote things they don't agree with or people they dislike?.

Really all sites with the system should go with Google and Disqus's way of things, where they only allow upvotes and you can downvote, but no one will see it (which begs the question of why they even bothered to allow downvotes at all).

Also those that are premium members on here can and do abuse the upvote system, giving them two upvotes over the one. 

I have a pretty sad life, but not so sad that I need to downvote people for having a different opinion than me.

I've noticed that too, and that's why I'm glad we don't have a voting syem for the forum posts.

Why downvote when you can reply anyway. The only thing I do downvote are predictions like PS4 is going to sell 200m+.

If I could up vote your comment I would. 

If I disagree with a comment I downvote it.

The simple solution is to stop comments becoming invisible, thus opinions aren't censored and the like/dislike for popularity actually works. There's a report button after all.

This here is the solution. Comments that a lot of people disagree with aren't necessarily bad comments, so they shouldn't be hidden! That said, ranking comments lowers just because people disagree with them is bad too. There should really be two separate voting systems to properly solve the problems:

• one for indicating agreement or disagreement
• one for indicating whether a comment is good or bad

Of course even a system like that can be abused, but at least disagreement and bad comments wouldn't automatically get mixed up. But at the very least, the current system shouldn't ever hide comments by default, or prevents answering to downvoted comment threads.