Until you clean up the abuse of the sole-purpose downvoters here (like @bloom) and the abuse of the reputation score that allows people to gain unwarranted high scores without doing anything but gaming the system, everything else you do will be a waste of time, as the potential will still exist for everyone's "words" (as you say) to be rendered hidden and essentially meaningless, and good contributors will eventually tire of working for nothing.

Keep up the good work you are doing, but we must address downvote abuse by people who sign up merely to downvote opinions/news/facts they don't like and contribute NOTHING ELSE but downvotes to the platform.