Bring back Dislikes on the Forums

General Discussion
1

Ever since the reformation from the old forums, this place has been plagued with one major issue:

FALSE FLAGGING

People false flag posts all the time, causing opinions to be silenced and accounts to even be unfairly suspended.

There is one primary cause of this issue at fault for this, too. The removal of a dislike system.

People yearn for ways of quickly and easily expressing disapproval without always taking
time to explain WHY they disagree, ESPECIALLY if it would just be repeating what someone else has already said. It’s just how humans behave. There are exceptions, but this is the norm in many instances.

So, whenever an unpopular opinion is expressed on this platform, you’re very likely to quickly accrue a multitude of flags on the post, even if it does not violate the Code of Conduct in any way, simply because it is quick and easy for people to apply them, and is the simplest way of them expressing their disagreement.

This was originally done through the dislike feature of the old Forums, in which people could simply downvote posts they disagreed with.

Unfortunately, there were flaws with that old system tied to such occurence. For some reason on the old forums, a post with a multitude of dislikes would be silenced automatically, even if no rules were violated. Furthermore, for some reason dislikes and likes were calculated together instead of separately, causing an echo chamber where one side would seem to completely dominate the other instead of sparking actual debate.

This was not a flaw in dislikes themselves, but that the creators of the website tied them to flawed features.

The issue of flase flagging that plagues these forums would be solved for the most part with the reinstatement of the dislike mechanic, but this time featured as a SEPARATE calculation where you can see both likes and dislikes calculated, and with no auto-silence in place tied to it.

This would also assist with moderation, as there would be less reports to sift through by the mods on this forum and there would be more time and less stress in dealing with actual worthwhile flags that are worth looking into.

TL;DR, The return of a dislike button, minus the former auto silence and presented as a separate value than likes, would assist with false flagging and moderation of the forums.

38 Likes
2

Yep, pretty accurate analysis on the topic. I will flag posts as trolling or spam occasionally, but if I had a dislike button then I probably wouldn’t. It is not worth the effort to reply to some people with a proper counterpoint when they will likely just cherrypick parts of it to argue against, move goal posts, or overlook the nuanced point-of-view.

8 Likes
3

Flagged, muted. Moving on.

/s

5 Likes
4

They kept on top of that for ages, by punishing the people who false flagged.

But they don’t now. You don’t need downvotes to deal with false flagging, you just need them to go back to actually policing it.

downvotes was a problem in the old forum, and there was a reason they removed it (which you do cover pretty well)

6 Likes
5

Well that makes no sense at all. Posts that are trolling or spam should be flagged not disliked. And if they aren’t trolling or spam, then you’re just admitting to false flagging :thinking:

2 Likes
6

We’ve been asking for this for years, they never do it

1 Like
7

i agree primarily because i want to see how many dislikes i can accrue.

8

It is what it is. I believe all of my flags to be accurate, but I would be less likely to flag anything if I could just dislike it instead.

9

That’s another reason its disabled.

1 Like
10

I don’t see false flagging as a problem tbh. The mods actually review hidden posts, so many times the flags get removed after a short time. The only time they don’t is when the OP is obviously being inflammatory and not simply giving their opinion.

11

Funny.

Side note, I forgot you could make text tiny in the posts. Thx for reminding me of that.

12

No I don’t want this to turn into a mini reddit and people downvoted for not sharing the same opinion as the masses lol

3 Likes
13

Such is why I’m suggesting separate recorded values for likes and dislikes instead of one number cumulating both, so that it is less likely to be an echo chamber and have the post be silenced/hidden by false flagging. This would allow you to see both the number of likes and dislikes individually, so you can see the comparison.

Right now, if an opinion is unpopular, it gets flagged to heck and back, and gets auto hidden because of it.

14

It already is, except instead of downvotes it’s flags.

1 Like
15

Hey OP thanks for posting a TL;DR, I love you.

16

No problem, i understand not everyone has time to read a long post. In the same vein as not everyone has time to write up a long post themselves.

That’s why I understand the appeal of having a quick and easy response system.

17

Wrong, if you accumulated enough dislikes on a post it would be automatically hidden and the post would get flagged for moderation anyway.

Brigading and silencing people was why they took it away, but they didn’t do anything about the actual issue that caused them to take away dislikes.

18

That’s…exactly why im proposing we bring it back WITHOUT the auto silence and report, as stated in the original post. So we can AVOID the initial issue that was the real problem at hand.

19

The real problem is that you can’t stop people from brigading, and any opportunity to weaponize lazy moderation policy will be abused by those kinds of people. The only way to genuinely stop brigading is to have active moderators who will ban anyone who false flags a post, so good luck with that.

20

The dislike function was abused to hell and back. It’s 10x worse than being false flagged by the community. Every post that might be against your “hot takes” will be downvoted.

Every thread about Mercy will be downvoted. Downvotes all day.

2 Likes