They “only likes” system is a better one. This has a lot to do with psychology. If you saw a post with a hugh number of dislikes, one would think that, although being a negative indicater judging from the people of the forum, it would still have the “support” of many people that also are agains’t it, for example someone saying that representation and Pride Event are healthy for the overall community (and doesn’t get flagged), and 40-80 dislikes, indicating possible 40-80 bigots or trolls. So the only like system actually gets you an indicator of how many people just support a specific post.
Seeing a hateful post with only 2-4 likes tells us there are very few people with that mindset in the forums.
Yes, such things might be downvoted, but without ridiculous features tied to such a thing like the auto silence and report, and the ability to see the comparison between dislikes to likes, That would certainly be the better alternative to mass false flagging, no?
Every comment I make would make enough downvotes to dig a hole to Hel, and I don’t need that extra negativity.
I regret what I post on the daily.
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It would be a benefit to discussion to see the comparison of values between those who disagree and those who agree with something. By only being able to see one side of the coin, you’re not given an accurate representation of the common concensus, which only serves the echo-chamber mentality of one-sidedness on the forums.
I totally agree with you. False flagging is it’s own problem. But downvotes were also a plague on the forums. There was no conversation. Just randomly your comment would be muted with nobody even bothering to try and tell you why. Which had a chilling effect on anyone saying anything that could remotely be thought of as a hot take or against the group think.
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bold of you to think that i care about the little things like that
I think you have really great points. I see tons of posts that are wrongfully flagged just because people don’t perhaps agree with ones opinions. Having a dislike button would just ease it for Blizzard themselves and they don’t need to spend unnecessary amount of time checking out posts that are just reported for wrong reasons.
Removing dislikes button are just unnecessary and doesn’t do any good. People will still express their disagreements down in the comment section if they have some. If anything, dislikes are a good way for people to navigate through posts to also see which ones they feel are worth spending time reading similar to how dislikes on YouTube videos could be beneficial.
The old forum proved that downvoting was one of the worst features.
To clarify, I’m not asking for dislikes to return AS THEY WERE.
The reason dislikes were removed was because of terrible features that were tied to them, primarily:
- The auto-mute and flag of the post when enough dislikes were accrued
- The combined calculation of likes and dislikes caused one side of the discussion to appear to dominate
I specifically am asking for the removal of these tied features, so that we can bring back the dislike feature WITHOUT the reasons that caused it’s removal in the first place.
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Every thread supporting her will be upvoted wdym
Removing dislikes was so bad and the false flagging forum goers recieved was almost doubled.
Why? Besides snarky replies people are just flagging everything now that they heavily disagree with.
We have less discussions and more so people just forcing opinions and muting others now.
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Downvotes could’ve been fixed. I know they want to encourage conversation but some ideas are so dumb that no words are needed.
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Sorry dude, no one is going to try to “See a bigot’s point of view”. At least no one with critical thinking skills. A group of individuals disagreeing with an idiot and explaining why they’re an idiot is a progress, not an echo chamber. Like there’s literally nothing of value they’d offer me
And who gets to decide, which ideas are dumb?
Downvotes were removed in attempt to make forums look more positive.
All Blizzard had to do with downvotes in the old forum was increase the threshold for the number downvotes before the post was greyed out, and then eventually hidden and requiring a click to view for the most egregious cases. They could have even just set it to be ratio-based, so that gaining enough upvotes could make a mass-downvoted post visible again.
I’m almost certain that having downvotes removed just helped empower trolls. The only way to discourage their behavior is to flag them outright, which is no-no behavior when they purposely start trolling in the grey areas of the CoC, where actioning them isn’t explicitly covered, and as such flagging them could, in theory, get the flagger’s account actioned instead. People are encouraged to write replies to why they disagree with an OP’s content. But in the case of blatant grey-zone trolling, all writing feedback does is result in is people feeding the trolls, often inadvertently, and bumping their stupid posts. You can ignore them yourself, but others won’t and their posts will float to the top and drown out real discussion. This is kind of important given the few times the devs do come here to casually click through a few topics for feedback, they shouldn’t be bombarded with bad topics made by trolls that drown out whatever legitimate sentiment they willingly came here for.
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It encouraged conversation, but who said, that conversation will be related to topic/not filled with personal insults?
Which often ends in personal insults, making it rather pointless.
I’d say handling insults just requires a staff of round-the-clock moderators that do their jobs. It’s something that really should be expected of any forums, IMO.
Or just leave forum as it is, since it already well established itself as platform for permanent war between “activists” and “bigots”. Neither side is interested in listening to other, and all moderators would achieve is picking side in that conflict.
