Reddit suffers from this issue. Everything looks like a controversial topic if you look at the up and down votes. The sad truth is that there are a lot of people who down vote everything except their own posts.

If you don’t get dozens of up votes in the first few minutes, your post will down-vote-flooded into oblivion and it won’t be able to recover.

This makes Reddit very random. After having used it for a few months I still don’t know what’s suitable for it and what isn’t. You never know how many of those down votes were genuine and how many are collateral damage by people who game the system. I’d guess that as much as 90% are random drive-by down votes.

They basically took approval voting and then broke it in the most horrible way. Up/down and counting these sounds simple, but it doesn’t work. In general nothing which relies on everyone’s good behavior (email spam is a good example) works as intended.

DZone is insofar funny, that it kind of ignores the down votes completely. They are displayed, but that’s it. The votes are also not anonymous, which makes gaming more apparent.

Creating a better system than Reddit’s isn’t that hard since it’s so fundamentally broken that it isn’t even funny anymore. For example there could be only up votes (approval voting), report as spam, and indirect down voting by writing a comment tagged as negative. Adding some cost to down votes is sensible. Down voting usually isn’t necessary anyways. Things go down on their own as others go to the top.