Hmm, voting system, may not be a bad idea, but I think that, there should be a note system too, and you can’t down vote, if you won’t explain why, and perhaps provide some additional information, like research papers, etc…
People could click the vote count, and it would resolve into bigger section, or separate page on this website, where would be:
All the down votes, on that topic/app/tool
Users who downvoted it
Notes explaining their reason why they made that vote
And also a section available to respond, and disprove the note/claim/theory/hypothesis, which (the response to the note) could be also voted on.
All of this could function similar way as Reddit threads.
The voting system on the forum is just to gauge how many people are interested in a recommendation so we can prioritize things, not to measure a tool’s popularity, so downvotes would not be helpful. This is also why people get a limited number of things they can vote for at once.
If a tool had 50 upvotes and 45 downvotes, we would definitely want to evaluate and respond to that before looking at a tool with 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes even though the second tool might have a higher net score.
The actual discussion will always be in the replies. The vote count itself has nothing to do with whether something is ultimately added to the site, so letting people negatively influence that count wouldn’t accomplish anything.
The voting system as is is quite confusing to me. I also noticed that even if you didn’t vote for something your own profile picture is shown amongst the voters