I'm not optimistic that a community of any decent size would be able to resist the urge to use votes to favor viewpoints that the majority agrees with, especially when they appear as multiple answers to a single question. The ability to push "truth" above "heresy" by upvoting one answer and downvoting another is extremely tempting, particularly in anonymous internet realms.

Agreed. I think scoping questions very tightly actually makes for a much healthier site community. Asking for "just what the Bible says" universally results in big arguments.

I see what you are saying but isn't that the general gist of all vote-based forums? The answer with the most amount of votes typically represents the most common viewpoint of the participants. We see this even in Codidact meta where reasonably asked questions get down-voted because people don't agree with the viewpoint - not because the question itself was asked in the wrong way.

This makes me wonder about the voting mechanism in general. UP/DOWN can be construed as bad question/good question. But what about the general discussion points of agree/disagree im wondering if an optional voting mechanism would work in this scenario?

@mattbrent Are you thinking along the lines of multiple independent upvote buttons, one meaning "I agree with this answer" and another for "This answer presented a perspective well and answered the question from that perspective even though I may not agree with it", and perhaps yet another for something more generic like "This answer is useful"? Maybe something along the lines of different "like" buttons on social media?

Yeah along those lines. I can't help but feel a purely up/down voting mechanism for a community where a lot of answers are contextual and opinionated will not do the subject justice. It seems likely to me that answers will start to be shaped by the views and opinions of the most active users and the votes will reflect that...maybe I'm wrong.

Matt, I’ve seen such popularity contest voting turn at least one site Somewhere Else into an essentially exclusively evangelical Protestant Christian site. Then questions that didn’t begin from those assumptions began being DV’d and even closed with comments about the answers being “self evident” and such, when in fact it was not self evident unless you began with evangelical assumptions about the biblical texts.

I would support some sort of separate voting mechanism for agree/disagree, if only to head off the common practice on the Other Site of upvoting and downvoting based on agreement or disagreement rather than on the quality of the answer.

Since my denomination (Swedenborgian) is in a tiny minority doctrinally, it was very common for my heavily researched and carefully written answers to be voted to the bottom of the stack because they took minority positions, while much shorter and more hastily written answers were voted to the top because they took more popular positions.

I realize this can't be entirely avoided. But I would support anything that can be done to make it less of a problem.