An old forum I used to frequent had a downvote system that required you to specify a reason for why you felt that post or comment required a downvote. That reason (and the account that submitted it) was visible to the person whose post got downvoted and to the moderators, but to no one else.
It still worked well for filtering out troll posts and spam, and legit posts were almost never downvoted as you couldn’t do so fully anonymously and moderators could take action when you abused the system.
I could see this becoming highly impractical when communities become as huge as on Reddit though, but for a smaller forum that one had a few hundred active users it worked really well.
An old forum I used to frequent had a downvote system that required you to specify a reason for why you felt that post or comment required a downvote. That reason (and the account that submitted it) was visible to the person whose post got downvoted and to the moderators, but to no one else.
It still worked well for filtering out troll posts and spam, and legit posts were almost never downvoted as you couldn’t do so fully anonymously and moderators could take action when you abused the system.
I could see this becoming highly impractical when communities become as huge as on Reddit though, but for a smaller forum that one had a few hundred active users it worked really well.