Please also review our SoylentNews Moderation Guidelines.
As always, we are willing to make changes to the system, but please post examples *with* links to any cases of suspected mod abuse. It's a lot easier to justify changing the system when evidence is in black and white. I also recommend that users make serious proposals on changes we can make. I'm not going to color the discussion with my own opinions, but as always, I will respond inline with comments when this goes live, and post a follow up article a few days after this one
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 20 2015, @02:12PM
In theory, I could see how downmodding could be used to kinda censor a particular opinion. In practice, what I've been seeing on SoylentNews is that "-1 Troll", "-1 Flamebait", and "-1 Overrated" are in fact being used the way they were intended, and the stuff getting modded into oblivion are those posts that truly deserve it.
You are of course welcome to browse the comments with a threshold of -1 to see exactly what you might be missing if only "one side" is presented.
Also, sometimes there really isn't another side of the issue. For example, if the question was whether astronauts had landed on the moon, the nutjobs who say they didn't should not be given equal time or equal standing.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.