[Idea] Remove Downvote

Verandure·Feb 18, 2014·3 votes·836 views

Right now, the downvote has too much power over what is and is not seen on the community platform. It, alone, can decide if a post is able to gain traction or not. Since I began to help (sporadically) with beta feedback, I've felt this was the only, truly glaring issue.

Only have upvotes. If a post is agreeable, or at least promotes discussion, upvote it. Downvotes will be replaced by the act of not upvoting. If a post is patently offensive, we can actually report it now, so pushing spam and such down with votes is obsolete.

4 Comments

LVNsNASmurfFeb 19, 20141 votes

Please take this down-vote for you post. I give it because clearly you have no idea how democratic rating systems work.

VerandureFeb 19, 20141 votes

Please take this downvote, not because I disagree, but because reasons.

LVNsNASmurfFeb 19, 20141 votes

Oh, I'm sorry, didn't you notice how the big post calling IS 'a failure of a human being' got a bunch of up votes, but then the tide turned and he got rightfully downvoted to oblivion.

Thats how the democratic rating system works, downvotes can destroy something bad which got randomly upvoted.

In order for no downvotes to work, we would have to upvote everything we felt wasn't bad so truely bad stuff got hidden.

VerandureFeb 19, 20141 votes

His post is volatile because both sides are voting based on personal bias for a meta argument between vBulletin and Reddit style forums. If people -actually- cared about the content of the post, it wouldn't have gotten upvoted or downvoted, it would have been ignored like the obvious trap it is.

Being able to unilaterally remove somebody from the hot list with a single downvote within the first few minutes of it being up is a bad thing. If something is patently offensive (language, pornography, spam) we have a fancy new "Report" button for it.

I can go to a low traffic sub community and literally erase a discussion. If all the conversations are at 1 vote, my 1 downvote will push it below every single ignored discussion on that list.

I'm more concerned with this kind of abuse case from trolls than the other.