I believe that a voting system of the type like Stack Exchange’s is not sustainable and it is not providing the good (useful) information (it is nice fertilizer for gamification and it - negative votes - may work to get rid of weeds, but it is not making a pretty garden otherwise).
See also this post of my on StackExchange https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/338680/is-the-voting-and-reputation-system-sustainable-how-can-we-improve-it-or-maybe where I provide a bunch of arguments and create a wider image of this view.
Sidenote:
In my post to SE that I mentioned, there is a link to a database query that can help to track the history for scores of different answers on the same question. Here’s the view for the securitySE question mentioned by Gilles. It is obvious how the ‘better’ posts are struggling to get above the ‘popular’ post. In addition, the posts have obtained a lot of votes in only the first few days. The newer placed posts are never gonna obtain a similar amount of votes.
This gamification system, which is about quantity of votes and not about quality of votes is gonna lose its value over time and sort of locks the game/play on any old post, making it such that most people lose the appetite to make any improvements in the old (popularized) topics. Any scoring system that relies on quantity is (quickly) gonna become highly asymmetric over time, and reduces the quality of the game and with it the quality of the content.
