We are working on a public feedback board that does away with up-vote counts and instead prompts 2 simple questions to provide the "popularity" and "trending" topics list. We still have a "like" but it does not translate into a public vote count.
The idea is that up-vote counts do not provide great detail into the how and why a topic is popular and from the feedback boards we have seen, lead to many features getting lost or looked over since they do not have a high vote number associated with them.
We have an animated gif on the page to show how it works at embarkable.io
Thoughts?