Well, I have to say I disagree that a voting system always harms discussion. I mean, Invision Power Board, XenForo and Burning Board forums all have a built in likes system (and commonly used plugins to extend it). I haven&#x27;t noticed forums running those scripts being less civil or having worse quality. Or the various vBulletin forums switching to XenForo losing their existing community feel and atmosphere.<p>Of course, there is a difference here when compared to platforms like Reddit and Hacker News though. Namely, the likes don&#x27;t affect how comments or discussions are shown. There&#x27;s a number of likes and dislikes under the post, and maybe a small icon on the topic list, but a heavily disliked post doesn&#x27;t get hidden or removed for it.<p>It&#x27;s also been a thing long before that, with various add ons. For example, vBulletin had a post thanks system mod which worked like likes&#x2F;upvotes:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vbulletin.org&#x2F;forum&#x2F;showthread.php?t=122944" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vbulletin.org&#x2F;forum&#x2F;showthread.php?t=122944</a><p>And phpBB had &#x27;karma&#x27; mods back in the early 00s.<p>Did quality get hit on sites with those mods? I didn&#x27;t really notice it.<p>On another note, it does make me want to see a study in regards to what sort of like&#x2F;reputation system keeps a forum or social network a more civil place.<p>Does only upvotes&#x2F;likes work better than having downvotes&#x2F;dislikes?<p>How about the inverse, where you can only dislike content rather than like it?<p>How about a private reputation system, where only the user giving the reputation and receiving it knows they&#x27;ve done so? That&#x27;s how vBulletin&#x27;s version used to work.<p>Does having more possibilities for votes help more than just like&#x2F;dislike? How does Facebook Reactions or XenForo Post Ratings compare to Reddit up&#x2F;downvotes?