Any options to hide/remove downvotes?

doiminat0r3600·6/8/2018, 8:41:57 PM·4 votes·2,988 views

I've been told that downvotes were thought of to be removed but then decided against because lots of people enjoy them.

I would like to see the possibility of hiding downvotes until you comment on it or something of the sorts. It allows users to actually see what is going through the minds of the people that downvote their posts.

Do they disagree? Do they just not like you or the idea? Is it already disproven by devs or forum mods? What prompted you to downvote something?

It's valuable knowledge and could help create a more constructive community rather than just have one that votes and moves on with no feedback.

3 Comments

ModThe Djinn6/8/2018, 8:45:58 PM2 votes

We currently have downvotes hidden until you visit a thread, which we decided was one of the more effective options. There's also an on-hover feature currently enabled that lets you hover over a thread title in the full board view (doesn't seem to reliably work in the individual thread view) to see the exact breakdown in terms of upvotes and downvotes.

We opted to avoid mandatory commenting for fear it would lead to a big increase in spam comments from people who just wanted to express their support or disagreement with an idea, as well as be viewed as frustrating by those who just want to express their thoughts without typing up a full response.

The idea of having an opt-in to the downvote system (or perhaps the entire voting system) is interesting though -- I'll definitely bring that up with the team and see if it's feasible and worth putting our somewhat limited bandwidth towards.