The Problem
Democracy is a wonderful thing, but to quote Heinlein:
[M]ajority rule gives the ruthless strong man plenty of elbow room to oppress his fellows.
With that in mind, I want to point out that meta's current semantics for discussion is broken. The current system actively discourages many people from posting thoughtful (but opinionated) questions or answers to questions that don't have an objective right or wrong. That is supposed to be the point of the tag. The tag's wiki currently says:
A discussion question may not necessarily have a clear-cut right or wrong answer and is often subjective.
However, the current ability to vote down discussions results in an echo-chamber effect. Symptoms of this include:
- People without rep to burn tend to avoid postings that will get down-voted, especially on contentious issues with a potential for a pile-on effect.
- People hide out in comments, criticizing others' opinions without offering anything substantive as a competing answer. Go head; I'll wait while you count the number of "You're wrong because..." comments that should really be posted as answers.
- The loudest and most opinionated people tend to drown out other voices, and to short-circuit the possibility of discussion by aggressively down-voting differing opinions.
All of these things should be easy to fix by a community that is solutions-oriented.
Propose a Solution
Please propose a constructive solution if you have one. If you don't think there's a problem, and that things are perfectly fine as they are, then feel free to upvote one of the existing answers that says the status quo is great, or add your own alternative.
Downvoting this question just means you don't want to consider the merits of the idea, either pro or con. That is not constructive, but hey--it's your vote.
The loudest and most opinionated people tend to drown out other voices
how? Do they have more than one vote because they have such loud voices? I have a very loud voice. Where can I fetch my extra votes?