I have slightly forked responses here, so bear with me.
1. If people can not handle the responsibility of not just swaying threads for the sake of swaying them, then what we'd do is put in a vote limiter or detection system for mass upvoting/downvoting. We've dealt with this in the contests and media systems for a very long time and its not as difficult as you'd think to beat. You just need to make it a bit harder and people give up. Currently there isn't a real consequence so its more happening by a few people trying to prove me wrong than anything else.
TL;DR - ability to vote too much is the easiest to solve problem ever.
2. I would argue you that this thread isn't good at all. Its a repost of a topic well covered (
https://www.newschoolers.com/ns/forums/readthread/thread_id/734640/cat_id/2/), and its full of hateful responses. So it was a good attempt at a thread where someone was supposed to just be stating what they saw, but it went to shit in a hurry.
TL;DR - this isn't actually a good thread
3. I think that everyone is mis-judging what they see in the 'score'. The score doesn't really end up meaning the same thing in forums (at least like this) as it does in media. In media, the score would tell you if something sucks or if its good. In discussion, good and sucks is subjective, depending both on what kind of conversation you like and your feelings on the topic at hand. Really, this thread's score (when you look at the rating bar) says that it is Interesting, but controversial with a slight lean towards either the negative or stupid. Threads with lots of votes can be:
Mostly downvotes - bad thread with negative opinions
Equal up and down - Controversial thread with mixed positive and negative opinions (some people would call these threads good, others bad)
Mostly upvotes - good thread with positive opinions
TL;DR - Low score doesn't mean the thread is bad.
The key here is that what the system is succeeding in is assigning a huge amount of data to a thread. The data is incredibly granular, and depending on what math we run on it after the fact we can come up with a myriad of sorting options. As I see it if we were going to be sorting threads we'd offer:
-Top Positive
-Top Negative
-Most controversial
-Hottest
Don't get caught thinking we would be so stupid as to rank threads exactly like we would media. We're pretty darn smart over here, and wouldn't do something that sucked so bad.
