Often we see people get into heated debates, and flame wars. It's happened here. It's happened on the old forums. It happens on Reddit. No community is immune. With the introduction of Spectrum, we got the ability to upvote a post or comment, but no ability to downvote. This was to "promote positivity" as I've seen it described, which is a noble goal. Unfortunately, I suspect it just leads to more flame threads in the long run. What if, as an alternative to "no downvotes", we provided people with the choice. You can either downvote, OR you can comment/reply. If you've commented on a post, or replied to a comment, then you can no longer downvote the parent post/comment. If you downvote something, then you are unable to comment on that something. If you downvote something, but then remove your downvote, you still have a cooldown before you can comment (1 hour? 4 hours? 8 hours?) It may seem like a silly idea, but I suspect that we'd get a lot less personal attacks with a system like this. Flame On!