Do away with voting entirely: site becomes vulnerable to forum sliding attacks because there's nothing driving popular posts to the top. Ok let's throw in a spam button to filter out the garbage. What happens when the Spam Threshold is triggered? Post gets deleted? That's a more severe form of censorship than downvotes. This is actually my gripe about comments that get hidden after being downvoted enough. Looking at you, Reddit and Voat. Let users enable a "hide spam posts" option? This does nothing because obviously everybody is going to enable it, effectively deleting posts that are unpopular. And let's not pretend the spam button won't be used as a downvote button, because it will. I think Poal chose the lesser of two evils. It's obvious how unlimited downvotes can be abused, we've all seen that happen. And yeah upvotes can emotionally influence, but I don't think it has as much of an impact as a downvote. After all, the human mind is more careful about avoiding pain than receiving rewards. Maybe upvotes could be limited somehow, I think that would be interesting to try. Give users an "allowance" based on time with a bonus based on total contributions? Idk. There's no magic solution.