So while browsing rule 34 today something occurred to me, that website only has an upvote button and no downvote button.
I think that is a better system than what we have here on e621, and let me explain why.

E621 has an issue of unfair voting feedback when it comes to niche fetishes and dark comedy.
The voting system is supposed to show users the quality of a submission and for upvotes it does that well, but people abuse the downvotes to simply mean "I find this content gross" rather than using the blacklist. This is not a fair representation of an artists skill level or the level of quality in their submission. Because downvotes and upvotes are shared in one single tally, we can end up in scenarios where greatly talanted artists that got many upvotes on their work has all their upvotes evened out to a very low score due to downvotes, or scenarios where a perfectly decent quality submission gets downvoted to oblivion just because it has a fetish or dark humor some people do not like.

The biggest reason I want this change is because good artists having people mass downvoting their posts because they're too dumb to use the blacklist properly can potentially discourage a lot of artists from wanting their art posted on this website. I also believe that submissions that ACTUALLY deserve the huge amount of downvotes they have, usually are content that violate some of the submissions standards of this website and should simply be reported rather than downvoted.

I have two separate suggestions on how this issue could be solved.
1. Remove the downvote function entirely. People would only see how much people like or has favorited a submission.
2. SEPARATE downvotes from upvotes, rather than making them one single tally. This would be a much more constructive way to show users how many people actually like a submission rather than only showing us a median of downvotes and upvotes prone to fetish bias.

simski said:
I have two separate suggestions on how this issue could be solved.
1. Remove the downvote function entirely. People would only see how much people like or has favorited a submission.
2. SEPARATE downvotes from upvotes, rather than making them one single tally. This would be a much more constructive way to show users how many people actually like a submission rather than only showing us a median of downvotes and upvotes prone to fetish bias.

1. Not going to happen, see topic #17309, topic #18674, topic #29396, & topic #42223. You'll get the same answer every time.
2. Technically, this does already exist (hover your cursor over the score to see the upvote/downvote tally). However, I'd argue the number of favourites to be a better indicator of how good the artwork is.

If you see an artist's work getting downvote-bombed for seemingly no reason, you can ask an admin to check on it to see if anybody's been downvoting based on a fetish.

we're not pulling a youtube