works for Reddit too - but there as well people who put unreasonable value to Karma, freak out when downvoted and will go to any length to get upvoted.
This is where the discord is right now,
-people who think that downvoting was an attack on their character (reputation etc) feel it was unwarranted, at the extreme even felt bullied.
-People who saw it as a quick efficient way to express disagreement are wondering why a perfect tool to do so was removed.
Another thing I don’t like about this system is if someone posts a stupid straw man argument, instead of other people down voting it with ‘straw man’, the initial poster is forced to defend themselves with another meaningless post. There’s unfortunately no shortage of people willing to take offense at disagreement and blow it out of proportion and into perceived personal attacks. Normally, we’d just downvote the crazies. Now we can’t. Not everyone has the patience to explain every misunderstanding, and it just gets frustrating after awhile, especially if we don’t have people downvoting.
Personally, I had gotten more cautious in downvoting recently for several reasons:
They were being overused by some people.
There’s a risk of incurring someone’s wrath and receiving dozens of retaliatory downvotes.
It didn’t feel like they would do anything productive.
Seeing Orion vs. Raisin now getting played out via posts instead of neg wars we wouldn’t notice, should serve as a good preview of where the forums are headed now…
I would have prefered the mods to get together (since they apparently didn’t have any agreement on what the downvote was used for) and come up with a policy. Post it. Enforce it.
This is going to lead to more fights and more work in the long run. Instead of me being able to downvote (a silent, disapproving shake of my head), now I’m going to have to call the person a jerk (in a nice way, of course - or not).
There have been posts on this thread that I want to downvote, but the only viable way to communicate my disagreement is to say “you’re being a a tinykitty.” And let’s face it, some of the people who earn the most downvoted have zero interest in a profitable back and forth. They’re just acting out. People can ignore it (as they could before), but you know they won’t. Heck, I probably won’t and an already tense board will just get messier. And the people who like to stir the pot can do with with impunity.
No one is interested in listening to your constant off-topic banter. You’ve cried wolf so many times that I’ve made it a point to report every single post that I see of yours that is remotely off-topic. If you have a problem, flag it and let the impartial moderators take care of it.
Well, I’m happy about this. I was hoping that all downvotes would be removed retroactively, but they’re staying. That means I still have to deal with the two downvotes I got from the time some people didn’t think I had the right to ask who Leah was in the name, “lokivsleah.” Yeah, I asked that very question and I got downvoted for it. And that’s why I don’t think we should be allowed to downvote. Some people abuse the system.
On the SE network, privileges are tied to reputation. Downvoting answers penalizes both the downvoter (-1) and the answerer (-2). If your questions get downvoted enough, your ability to post new questions gets throttled quite severely.
My very first post started me off with a reputation of -5.
Obviously I survived the ordeal and continued to post material in a way that this forum thought was more palatable.
That’s community enforcement and not community bullying. Had I continued to make posts in that style, my reputation would have gotten to the point where I would not be able to post again.
I learned that it was best to compromise. You can continue to express your opinion without being downvoted so long as you recognize that there are alternative opinions to yours and they may also have merit and value.
Removing the downvote leads to the nonsense that we are seeing in this thread.