We went through this same debacle at Voat a few weeks before the site was closed. I made the best argument I could at the time, agreeing with your comment above. I have to be honest though, and I don't like to admit I'm wrong, but I think I was beaten. Now, here's the caveat. You could downvote at Voat. That's trickier here, and seems to be up to mod discretion whether or not your downvotes were justified, i.e. whether the content you downvoted was actually 'spam'. If you have the ability to downvote, that takes care of the porn problem. People can simply block the sub, and/or downvote the content into oblivion, at the same time communicating the group consensus that said content is unwanted. Now you at least have a means of punishing the user account that's posting the unwanted content. That's not as easy here. If this site is going to truly be a 'free speech' site in the classical liberal sense everyone in this thread is saying it is, then that necessarily means every user must have the ability to voice disagreement. You short-circuit that by only allowing downvoting to indicate 'spam'. The best we can currently do at Poal is to not 'show love' and let the unwanted content sit at 0, which at best just indicates neutrality. The heart of the problem, as I see it, is that we are being told to distinguish agreement and disagreement in terms of two different substances. We agree quantitatively, but we must disagree qualitatively. We measure agreement, we only *talk about* disagreement. I think the discrepancy becomes clear in the case of porn. Is anyone in a porn sub going to be inclined to read or respond to your verbal arguments? Come on, let's be realistic. For verbal disagreement to work, you've got to have a discourse. This is why we need to figure out a way to make disagreeing quantitative here imo.