Requiring people to create an answer to express their opinion will suppress people expressing their opinion, whether you agree with votes meaning something or not. It's so much less time consuming, less stressful, to just cast a vote. If we're effectively required to join into a back/forth discussion to express our opinion... you'll see a lot less opinions expressed.

@KevinB Please quote the sentence where I'm saying people should be required to write answers to express their opinions? If that's what you took away from this post, you missed its point. I think I've been pretty clear in saying that posts are for arguments, for debating and discussing, and distinguishing the actual arguments used in those posts from the votes people give to those arguments.

This post challenges the notion that downvotes are important for seeing which arguments people agree with: you can also express an opinion by upvoting the arguments you agree with, while just not voting for the ones you don't agree with. Like you can vote for a specific politician you agree with but not against others you disagree with in most elections. Having only one post to vote for is like a dictatorship; that's why having more than one post is important, but I'm not requiring people to create an answer in order to endorse someone else's arguments.

If you can't express your opinion with a downvote, you either don't express it or have to answer.

@KevinB What you're calling 'expressing an opinion' is literally nothing more than saying 'I endorse this' or 'I don't endorse this', which can be summarized in 'I vote for this' or 'I don't vote for this' just as well. The only case in which you would 'have' to write an answer is if you have arguments to bring to the table that haven't been raised by others yet, and you feel they should really, really, really be there.

It's one sided. It's puts a thumb on the scale and effectively says "If you agree with this, it takes 0 effort to provide that feedback. If you don't, you have to climb mountains and shout with megaphones, and we'll probably still ignore you anyway."

It's a lot harder to speak out against things than it is to just silently follow along.

@KevinB Silently following along doesn't create discussion/debate. Right now, the thumb is on the other side of the scale: It takes 0 effort to provide a vote, without further feedback or counterarguments. That is not a discussion/debate, it actually impedes it because no one offers up counterarguments, just votes. If meta sites are to host discussions/debates, something needs to change, but making downvoting even more important than people already think it is, is not going to encourage more discussion and debate. A new system should encourage more discussion and debate, not more voting.

I did write in my answer that I think the current system is messed up. But 'more downvotes' aren't going to fix that system.

Even if you agree with something under the current system, you need 15 reputation points on this site to express it under the current system.

The only thing that's open from the beginning, that you can do if you have 1 point: Write about your arguments.

Yet another feature that is often used to hide feedback

I don't know. 15 points aren't that hard to come by.

And even then, there's always the anonymous feedback tools.

But the point is: You already have to make some effort to 'express an opinion'.

At the very least, you have to make some effort to be able to express that opinion through votes only, if you want that to be the only thing visible.

Again, there's a difference between 'expressing opinions' (if those opinions are limited to agreement/disagreement) and hosting discussion/debate.

Too much opinions and there's not enough discussion/debate

Too much 'discussion/debate', and there won't be enough opinions.

It's a balance that the current system may not have, but that the feature request is also not going to create.