I know gamedev is non profit organization, but I lately have found its up/down voting system as quite unprofessional, as opposed to SO
Stack Overflow reputation is mostly a "feel good" popularity contest designed to encourage people to keep participating, in the same way Free to Play games encourage users to get addicted and keep coming back. It's an extrinsic motivator. It's designed to encourage continual participation. It tries to encourage participation in helpful ways, true, but it doesn't create a very friendly environment. It creates a very "correct" environment, where privileged people can have their power trips on newer users if they didn't cross all their 't's and dot their 'i's.
GameDev's reputation is designed to encourage friendly behavior, discourage unfriendly behavior.
The reputation systems are designed to do different things. You feel Stack Overflow's is "professional" because it makes you feel good. It's designed to make you feel good.
Stack Overflow is a question-and-answer format. GameDev.net is a discussion-centric format. They serve different purposes.
Saying that GameDev's system isn't working is perfectly valid. Suggesting GameDev adopts Stack Overflow's system, is suggesting GameDev stop focusing primarily on community friendliness, and instead focus on extrinsic gamification to encourage participation.
GameDev.net and Stack Overflow both try to crowd-source moderation. Stack Overflow does this by empowering users to become moderators, and act like moderators, which leads to power trips because higher ranking users have more power and authority than lower-ranking users, and use that to moderate rather than help, newer users. New users get beat down based on the format of their questions. You can act like a jerk on Stack Overflow, and you get uprated for it, as long as you're not going too overboard.
GameDev instead of making community members into moderators, still keeps a moderator team for extreme situations, and lets everyone in the community, regardless of reputation, participate in informing each other when behavior is incorrect.
This leads to an unfortunate side-effect that when one or two people downvote improperly (based on incorrect knowledge rather than behavior), people flip out, until the community as a whole balances it out.
This doesn't mean GameDev's system can't be improved, but the only "flaw" in it I see is when people get their feelings hurt that they were downvoted by a few of their peers, before everyone else jumps in and balances things out by undoing the improper downvotes. <- This is something I, and others, do on a regular basis. If I see downvotes I disagree with, because they are voted down knowledge rather than behavior, or because they misinterpreted the behavior, I upvote to undo the downvote.
Another downside I see, is when someone is really misbehaving, being exceptionally rude, then people "dog pile" on that user and they get pummeled by a stream of downratings. Maybe a cap of a net of -10 downvotes would help that.
Or when someone goes on a "spree" to downvote every post by a user in a thread... though again, that's usually self-corrected by the community - I, and others, have corrected many situations like that when they are undeserved. And when someone goes to unrelated threads to continue downvoting, that's dealt with by moderators.
A rating system that doesn't force people to improve their behavior is a failure. Stack Overflow's rating system makes people feel good, and encourages more participation. GameDev's system makes people feel bad, but encourages them to grow as individuals to their own benefit.
I cannot tell how to make voting system to target its purpose more, I can criticise only.
That's where I am also. I'd like the system improved, but I don't know how to improve it.
However, I feel like the current state is acceptable, and is more good than bad, and I also dislike the Stack Overflow "feel good about nothing" model. I'm not the only one who dislikes the SO reputation system.