Currently, especially on sites like Reddit, the upvote/downvote buttons are abused as agree/disagree buttons and are clicked with little thought.
The recent troubles on Reddit have people talking about alternatives. An old site - one of the first voting based forums - was brought up, Slashdot.
It has an interesting voting system. Only some people can vote - I forgot the requirements. Each post maxes out at 5 points. Often/almost always the post has a label next to it saying why it was upvoted - e.g. Informative, Insightful, Interesting, ... I can't remember the details of the system as I mostly lurked back then as a kid.
Anyway, I think a shift to a more deliberate form of voting might be what the article is advocating.
One day you would get on the site, and have 5 votes to spend. If you didn't spend them, they would go away and it would take a little longer to get more next time.
It was a really interesting system. People did act a bit more seriously when they had votes, and there was the metamoderation system for keeping them accountable. It was a little bit complex, but only long-term users would see it, and worked better than any other system I have seen on practice.
