What happened to the 'neigh' button?

@Bryce  
How do you shorten those with hundreds vote then?

@Serenade_Acceso_Forza  

 
Um. Yes?
 
You trust us with lots of things, like not losing your personal data and not forgetting to back the site up. We also store data about how the site is used and can read that and make informed decisions about it.
 
For a comparison of how much less used downvotes are compared to upvotes, have a graph. I will stress this is not all the data we used in our decision to sacrifice that particular element.
 

 
For those who don’t trust us - you don’t need to use this website!

@Grieffon  

 
This is unfortunately the issue - you still need 3 characters even if you abbreviate 4+ characters. And we do hit those 3-4 character numbers quite frequently in terms of site usage - bear in mind things like the list pages for highest scoring etc, which are quite frequently used.

@Clover the Clever  

 
That smells of average patient temperature in a hospital: one is dead, another has fever, but the average is 36.6C, so everything is perfect.
 
Yes, most pictures are upvoted. But there’re pictures that are mostly downvoted, and for a reason. What you’re saying with this graph is that downvote button is useless for most pictures. Why, yes, sure. But there’re other pictures! Bad pictures!

@IAmAPony  

 
A whopping 4.92% of pictures on the site have a negative score.
 
Question: If we removed the upvote button from thumbnails too, to bring us into line with other imageboards, would you (small, vocal) lot complain less or more?

@Clover the Clever  

 
5% isn’t a tiny number. What is the percent of pictures with more than 10 downvotes, by the way?
 
I’d prefer both upvotes and downvotes displayed instead of just one number, but giving upvoters and downvoters the same treatment would be fair I guess. I don’t see this as an improvement from the previous state though.

Removing the ability to downvote from the thumbnail is a bad idea; it’s like adding a free extra taunt to every trolltastic shitpost just to make life a little sweatier for downvote fetishists, because now anyone who wants to downvote their MS Paint Hitler Trixie Dildo Rapist picture has to go through extra effort to do so. This seems like something that’s going to needlessly increase drama by forcing someone who was already pissed off by an image– but willing to just downvote it and move on– to instead go into the room where people are talking about it and do it from there, where they’ll be more likely to get involved in a conversation that shouldn’t have included them in the first place. It’s banbait. I know I certainly get plenty of cheerful, enthusiastic responses and healthy intellectual discussion any time I actually go to the comment section and point out what objectively dickish behavior it is to come to an image booru and post screencaps from 4chan instead of just keeping it on 4chan where it belongs. Now I can’t just downvote that inherently bad garbage from the spoilered greentext or text only tags on the thumbnail page, I have to actually go in there to do it, which increases the likelihood of slowing down long enough to say something about it, and that guarantees a delightful exchange of respectful disagreement courteously presented, because the average 4channer is more easily offended than the average PinkiePony.
 
This change is almost certainly going to have the intended effect of reducing the amount of drive-by downvotes from casual haters, which is fine for preventing good art of weird fetishes from being downvoted by casual dopes who can’t just let other people have their freaky kinks, but it’s also going to condense the source of the downvotes to People Who Care Enough To Take The Extra Effort, which is exactly the sort of person you don’t want opening the image page and going into the comments in the first place.
 
@Clover the Clever  
I’d complain more; having the ability to Up/Down from a thumbnail page is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. I really don’t need to waste my time or bandwidth looking up close at a two minute MS Paint picture of Sonic pooping on Rainbow Dash to know it deserves a metaphorical middle finger, and an awesome picture with an absurd res tag is still awesome enough at the smaller size to not warrant taking all day to load on a weak connection. Opening new windows/tabs is also a chore on most mobile devices, especially iPads and their joyously magnificent awesometastic GREAT inability to do two things at once.

@Clover the Clever
 
 
Under 0.5%, then it could be considered useless. Statistic man.

@TexasUberAlles  
Downvoting things from a spoiler without ever seeing the image is the sort thing we’d like to see stop. If it’s something you already know you never want to see any of, then that’s what filters are for.
 
If enough people filter something, it’ll get less and less votes and comments until uploaders simply stop considering it worth uploading.
 
And yes, screencaps of text walls from another site aren’t really what the booru was built for, but every so often there are actually decent ones uploaded that I’d say are worth archiving.

@The Smiling Pony  
So, remove the fave, yay, and neigh buttons from thumbnails that are hidden by spoiler images for the viewing user?

Just to make it clear to people - we are going to experiment with this. This means not everybody will see the same version of the gallery link bar.
 
I will make this really, really clear though: the site developers do not have spare time to burn on this forever. Myself and barbeque are the main people involved with these updates and we’ve both got a day job to deal with that actually pays the bills, real life to deal with - we’ll be aiming to get some of this out in the next couple of days.
 
In the meantime, please calm the fuck down and relax. Watch some episodes of your favorite show involving magical ponies. The world isn’t ending, and this site will continue to change and evolve.
 
As a side note, we have these forums to allow reasonable and rational discussion of issues. I think we’re much more open than the vast majority of other sites in how we let people contribute to the site. Mods will be issuing warnings and bans where appropriate under the rules. Please keep these discussions civil. We’re only human and if you just decide you’re going to shout at us all the time instead of having a discussion A) you’re likely to stop us actually doing this and B) you’re going to get banned under rule 0.

@Background Pony  

 
Not a bad idea, to be fair - we’ll have a play with that.

@Clover the Clever
 
 
Only few is really making trouble, most of us is just complaining as feedback.
 
:V

Who even cares about the number of favorites enough to want it on the thumbnail? The number of upvotes does pretty much the same job and I’m sure they also correlate, more or less. Removing the downvote button for a fav counter makes exactly zero sense. Might as well have removed the voting feature itself and only kept faves, since nobody will bother opening blatantly bad art, tired memes or troll art just to slap a thumbs down on them. People hell bent on downvoting something for the sake of it will do it anyway just to make a point.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Have all the YouTube debacles taught you nothing?
 
@Grieffon  
C. 1C, 2C, 3C, 4C, 5C, 6C, 7C, 8C, 9C, 1K…

I pretty much only spend any time fav’ing or upvoting because it’s made easier and quicker than a lot of other sites. I can see the image fine or I’ve seen it before, I usually click only if I want the large version or to see comments.  
Also  
Now images worthy of being downvoted will have the same worth as unnoticed images. ie not very high scores (Well not while it is still possible to ↓down vote after clicking the image)

About abbreviated large numbers sometimes not fitting: this could be done in a dynamic fashion, i.e. only when necessary based on the length if the whole line.
 
Also, if this is only a problem on images with thousands of votes/faves, it only affects a very, very tiny subset of images. I can’t recall ever seeing an image that had 1000+ faves and 1000+ votes. There may well be some (if there are, then statistically I’m pretty sure I’d like to see them), I’m not expressing excessive skepticism about their possible existence, just saying that it’s obviously not a huge problem that is often ruining the page layout.
 
Another idea: the “yay” and “neigh” text, horse puns aside, are pretty long. They could be replaced with simple arrow icons or arrow dingbats, which would be smaller and easily allow four-digit fave counts and vote counts. Eliminating the bullet points and replacing them with simple spaces or replacing space_bullet_space with interpunct would also probably save horizontal space.
 
Many better solutions are at hand.
 
MOST CRITICALLY, the fact that the downvote button was the least used does not have any logical implication about the appropriateness of removing it. It could equally well be argued that it is sub-optimally utilized and this change will exacerbate the situation.

I enjoy having to open >>518839 to do anything against it.

@Stricken  
30 other people seemed to manage doing so just fine.

@Stricken  

 
It’s pretty much this, a lot of people just don’t want to have to open up images like these just to downvote.  
But then on the other hand random douches can’t go downvote everything for no reason, at least not as efficiently.

@Background Pony
 
And he did downvote it just fine, just like the others. However, that doesn’t mean they wanted to click the image, all the same.

Just FYI, there’s a pretty big thread on /mlp/ about people disliking this decision. Don’t know why I said this, but it’s there.

@Itsthinking
 
And why arent they discussing it here?

@SocDev  
Because they don’t think the mods listen.

@Itsthinking  
We did this thing because we asked for suggestions and listened… WELP