Permanently Deleted

  • jabrd [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    When are we getting downvotes back. Some of y’all got terrible opinions and I want to let you know it without having to take time explaining why you’re bad and wrong

          • single_use [none/use name]
            ·
            4 years ago

            This is a good reason to remove downvotes, and the site is better off without them.

            That being said, one of the useful things about downvotes is that they help to hide bad comments/discussions (sometimes to protect viewers before mods can remove them) and discourage feeding trolls. When a comment is sitting at -17, it's clear that the community has expressed its disapproval of the sentiment. But when a terrible comment is at 2 points with no replies, it's ambiguous as to whether the community has rejected its sentiment or just has no opinion on it. I feel like this could lead to lots of unnecessary back-and-forth ("this hasn't been called out yet and somebody needs to tell this person they're wrong") and just increase the portion of space/mental energy dedicated to bad comments.

            There might be a way to find the best of both worlds, like a repurposed downvote which does not affect visible score at all but auto-hides the comment if enough people downvote. It would prevent individuals from essentially bullying or harassing people, but would also keep the comment hidden by default (which signals that the comment is not something the community endorses, and also serves as a kind of catch-all trigger warning for comments that haven't been removed yet). Bad actors or colluders would be a lot easier to catch, too.

          • SerLava [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            I was initially annoyed at downvotes being removed, but the site is honestly much more enjoyable without them. It's great.

            I do still think an amazing gag would be to have a mod-only toggle that turns on downvotes for a specific post, while simultaneously giving the post a special flair that says "DOWNVOTES ENABLED" lmao. But there are higher dev priorities right now

          • VYKNIGHT [none/use name]
            ·
            4 years ago

            I see what you mean, downvoting is a huge hassle to moderate and it's p easy to just make a bot that just downvotes everything with the word trans or something. But from a user standpoint sometimes all you really want is to just drop a dislike when someone's posting some dumb shit rather than spending the time to write replying. Hm, in that case I don't there's a good way to bring back downvotes unless we restrict registration, which isnt want you want to do when you're trying to grow.

            • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
              ·
              4 years ago

              Unironically do the youtube thing where the downvote button has no coding beyond its functionality as a button you can click, maybe do a client side -1 to the score.