Well from personal experience there are plenty of times where I've seen comments being down voted and I'd never see any responses to them. Maybe the vendetta comment was too strong but I wish there would be more posters coming out and saying why they disagree with the comment rather than blindly down voting it.

I wouldn't personally have a problem with it becoming a discussion forum since comment sections are usually benefited by that aspect anyway.

They are comments. People should be able to voice their opinion about a movie without having to bother with replies. I personally do not want the comments section to become a discussion forum.

In my experience... proper comments deserving upvotes usually receives them, regardless of them being negative slants or positive spins. Rarely do I see the kind of vendetta you speak of. This is the Internet after all, it will be what it will be.

The one problem I have with the down voting system is that it discourages discussion. If you post a negative comment about a film or just say that you didn't like it and at least say why, it'll still be down voted. Basically people are disagreeing for the sake of it but for obvious vendetta reasons they don't wish to say why There should at least be a reply system in place so discussion can be facilitated better. It's one of the reasons why Letterboxd just works :)

@dpanter What was the old system?

Have no problems with the downvoting system either. It's necessary to show disapproval at comment that are trolling or just posting blog link spam. Sure I've seen comments being downvoted that probably shouldn't have been but then you get keyboard warriors everywhere.

The advantages of downvoting well outweigh the disadvantages.
I'd rather not go back to the old system.

I second the down- voting removal. The intentions were good, but it sometimes seems like some people just down vote for the sake of it.

I think down-voting should be removed. It's mostly only used for personal vendettas or because someone has said they dislike a film. There's no need to spread the hate.

It should be built into the comment system so that users don't need to manually do a quote.

Love the idea of up-voting and down-voting comments. There are plenty of constructive comments on iCM, but unfortunately, there are an equal amount that are effectively spam.

You can quote someone, only it's a little bit more work than clicking a "quote" button. Select the text you want to quote and copy it. Paste it into a comment box and put the following around the quoted text: [quote=person]This is quoted text[/quote].

Can't help with the rest, though.

Once again I find myself liking your ideas without votes to spend on it :(