While I haven’t visited 4chan in ages, I swear these forums slip closer and closer to mirroring those boards every day. It really got bad after Blizzard let go of so much of their staff a few years back, and it’s obvious they don’t care about keeping this place under control. The worst of the lot always comes out late at night (pacific time) and especially during the weekends; although admittedly there is sometimes some entertaining drama to read through before the Blizzard mods wake up the next day (or Monday) and delete it all.
Literally just returned from a two month suspension because of mass flagging
Happens. Posting an unpopular opinion on the forums right now is likely to get you banned or suspended due to mass flagging. And the mods are either too busy or too uncaring to review every case properly to accurately judge if punishment is deserved.
good analysis
the other issue is without a dislike button the only way (aside from flagging) is to leave a comment of disapproval, and comments bump the posts visibility; if a post bothers you enough that you want to dislike it you probably dont want to boost it to the top of the forum, as a result negative threads always dominate the site
In my opinion downvotes were not healthy at all, they stifled discussions as people would downvote perfectly legitimate opinions and responses. At least now people falsely flagged have a chance of getting their posts visible again, back then you could get -100 likes for saying you liked Mercy or that Roadhog’s hook wasn’t a one-shot. People wouldn’t even bother forming a proper argument, just lazily dislike. It’s not very conductive for a forum.
Now, do they need to do something about the false flags? Definitely! But going back to an equally bad, or in my opinion worse, system isn’t the way.