Appears as if even before deciding to shut down the boards to hide the bad press they were trying other ways.
Post votes remain but thread title upvotes appear to have completely vanished for me around a month ago. I wondered at the time whether it was a technical glitch but why spend time on this if they knew the boards would close?
My only conclusion is they tried one thing then decided on something else.
Appears as if even before deciding to shut down the boards to hide the bad press
That's not why the boards are being shut down.
The moderation team decided to remove thread upvotes as we had no other way to combat the vote bots/vote manipulation that was happening at an increased rate. The reason it happened now as opposed to sooner is because in the past when we have considered this option, the community feedback has been very strongly negative.
This platform has no facility to deal with fraudulent votes. Someone with a bot or group was hitting threads with 60 downvotes in a matter of minutes, or keeping everything downvoted to a net of -1. The only way to prevent fraudulent votes was to prevent votes. Sorry to ruin your conspiracy theory.
They were already trying to censor things, but it was too evident and not good for the name (aka, the facade) of this company.
Eg., I remember a deleted Pyke thread, when he was skyrocketing in wr, pick rate and ban rate, and nothing was being addressed. There were stats, long posts and so, and they still deleted it for lack of efforts or wrong board (it was Gameplay), as an excuse. The author asked about it, and the answers were just pathetic. And lots of shady things like that, even a "Herald" claiming there wasn't any issue with the moderation in here.
Now the dirty job has been left to third party people (with an agreement, of course).
Edit: to the 3 5 ----s who downvoted, since you look to approve censorship and power abuses, I really hope you'll enjoy this kind of things in your future ;)
Probably because they couldn't figure out how to deal with up/downvote bots.
And another reason to make boards less appealing, to claim nobody uses it anymore.
Boards aren't really being removed.
They're being replaced with Eternals.
Vote with your wallet.
in EU you still can downvote
