Definitely do not remove the respect system. I won't disagree that jokes should be upvoted less and content upvoted more. But that would essentially be censoring a certain format of speech, because you do not like the impact the speech has or what people are saying with it, and that should be against anyone's principles.
I don't know what the answer is, but maybe aggressively forking offtrack topics are a good idea. The large mafia subforum grew out of an "in defense of monopoly" thread, which shows that interesting things can come from sidetracks, but at the same time shows a thread can definitely dig deep into something that OP might not be interested. Forking isn't really censoring people if it's done in an internally consistent way, and censorship should be a one-step-after-last resort, when you turn the server off, maybe you censor the powered down server a little bit, that's when it's ok.
You could split it in two.
Smiley for funny content, arrow or plus or thumbs up for serious content.
The Wine Merchant face on Discord is pretty fantastic for this.
