The truth is that downvoting has often typically caused way more issues than it’s helped. I won’t go into too many details about the how and why, as the original thread did a pretty good job explaining it, but we’ve gotten a large number of complaints from artists and other members of the site about how images seemed to be getting a large number of unjustified downvotes, and we saw plenty of evidence of abuse as well. So based on that feedback, a change was implemented.
Obviously this change is getting feedback of it’s own, some positive, some negative. We would very much like to find the best balance between eliminating the concerns the old implementation of downvoting has caused, but still allow it as feedback if that’s what the community so desires.
A few suggestions have already popped up on how to further refine this change. These two are the ones that stand out the most though. Note that these are paraphrased/summarized by me, and not a direct quote from anyone:
Reddit-style scoring
Basically, re-enable downvoting, but do not show individual counts of upvotes/downvotes. Instead, only show a cumulative score for an image. That way, images that are particularly bad/shitposty will still have low/negative scores, but an individual downvote will have much less effect, as there’s no count of how many downvotes an image has received. This means that score becomes an overall summary of the community’s reaction to an image, and it can still be used for filtering purposes (hiding images with scores less than -50, for example), but the temptation to abuse it will be less prominent, as there’s nothing obviously indicating that the number of downvotes is increasing.
Keep the current scoring system (score == upvote count), but also show a less prominant statistic about how many people have hidden an image. This again can be used to gauge how the community has reacted to an image, but without having any negative impact on image scores.
Basically, revert everything back to the way it was, but just add a hide button in addition.
Reddit-style scoring with both percentage and total number of votes visible to all users.A separate hide button.A Negative Feedback button that replaces the downvote button, and possibly the report button. When pressed, users are prompted to provide a multiple-choice answer for their feedback, with a clear explanation of what each choice means. (See Overwatch’s new report system for an example.) Multiple answers can be selected at one time. Choices could include “I dislike the theme”, “offensive content”, “low quality (please specify)”, “breaks rule #x”, etc. Some answers will decrease the score, some answers will report the post, and some answers will do neither. (The site moderators will decide which answers do what.) The feedback would be visible to all users.
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