Society needs downvotes with context. Show me downvotes by left leaning and right leaning users. Left and right downvoting each other is noise. Show me when an echo chamber disagrees with itself.
Yes. Downvotes are vectors and amendable to cluster analysis. I've been proposing this on HN for a long long time but the answer has always been 'data explosion, arc is meant to be small and fast and this will break it.'
I'm researching different voting algorithms for HN. If you're interested, please contact me (email in profile).