Comprehensive analysis of why the 'No Downvote' system is severely flawed

Yes, I recognise that this topic has already been discussed to death, but the more threads I see on the matter, the more I see the same points made repeatedly from those against them, which I feel that parties for haven’t addressed well enough.

So to start
1. Should
The first thing I want to address is “should”. A lot of the time when the topic of downvotes take place, people talk about what “should” or is “meant” to happen in a discussion. This is an internet forum for a video game. This is not a professional debate. The word “should” gets thrown about but ignores what is realistically going to take place. People don’t follow “should” when it comes to discussion, and I’ll draw examples of this in future points.

Going to address his points backwards just because second is easier than the first.

2. Hiding comments
Downvotes hiding someones thoughts and opinions was a feature of Blizzards forums. Yes downvotes caused that, but they didn’t need to. This was out of players control. Why not simply remove this feature if it was a problem? Downvotes do not have to hide comments. Just because someone disagreed does not mean the disagreed opinion or comment needed to be hidden. The person made the comment, they should be forced to stand by it and Blizzard shouldn’t have hid it for them.

3. It promotes discussion
As for promoting “constructive counterpoints”, this in a noble intention. It is nice that they want their player base to be a higher standard, but removing downvotes does not suddenly make discussions more constructive or friendlier. It will be the same standard of comments we’ve always had. Comments that ignore facts in favour of opinions. Comments that are biased. Comments that exaggerate. Comments that are completely off point. Removing downvotes does nothing to improve these things.
Yes, I understand the intention here is to get the person to say something rather than nothing at all, which leads in to my next point.

4. I spoke first
The person who disagrees is expected to (“should”) provide counterpoints, but disagreement can only apply to anything after the first statement. What that means is that the first comment can be literally anything, but then it’s on person number two to have to explain themselves.
Consider the following 2 examples:
Someone makes a new thread stating “I think that Tracer dies too easily. I think she would be balanced if she has 500 health.” Now almost all of us know this is an absurd statement and 99.99% of us would disagree with this, but now we have to (“should”) provide counter points why this wouldn’t be balanced. But the original poster didn’t provide any reason why it would be balanced. They “should” have, but they didn’t. Again this is an internet forum and it’s an extremely possible and likely thing to occur. So now if you want to disagree, you need to explain to someone why you disagree when they didn’t even explain themselves. But if anyone agrees with the premise that Tracer should have 500 health, they can pop in, give the comment a like, and move along, also without providing any argument or reasoning. So long as you agree you aren’t expected to contribute anything to a discussion, no matter what was said. Now, the previous said, given this is an internet forum you’re less likely to get well thought out counterpoints expressing disagreement and more likely to get something along the lines of “You’re why the devs shouldn’t listen to the forums for balance”. Again the removal of downvotes does not stop comments like these.

But now lets reverse it: someone makes a new thread that says “I think Tracer would be unbalanced if she had 500 health.” Now if you disagree with this statement, you’re the one expected to (“should”) explain yourself. But the original posters doesn’t now. It’s the same comment being made, but because someone else made a comment first, you’re expected now to provide counter points. Ultimately it’s just a matter of who got their opinion in first. This partially leads into

5. They already said it for me
In many of the threads I’ve seen on this topic I’ve seen comments along the lines of “You don’t need to add to the conversation if you agree because the comment you agreed with already said what you had to say.” Did it? Always? Can you honestly say every comment you’ve ever liked ever has exactly expressed your opinion on a topic exactly how you would have expressed it? If the answer to this, as I suspect, is a no, then why are you not then expected to participate to the discussion and expand on what they said? I mean, the option is there if you chose, but you don’t have to. If the removal of downvotes was meant to promote discussion, then why is the person who agrees allowed the ability to express their opinions on a matter without comment via an upvote? Why should they not have to participate with their own thoughts, even if those thoughts reiterate ideas mentioned already?

I find it peculiar that a game dev like Blizzard would promote such a mentality. With all of my experience in this industry (I work in film/animation. Extremely similar development process), telling someone why there their iis good is just as important as telling someone why their thing is bad. A client saying “Yeah it’s good.” is just as unhelpful as a “Nah it’s bad”. It didn’t tell you anything. It doesn’t give you any indication of what specifically they liked which can flow over in to future work.

6. Disagreeing without discussion
Combining points 4 and 5, you can actually disagree with a topic or comment, and still not contribute to the discussion, so long as someone already has already expressed disagreement in someway. You can simply like the comment that someone made disagreeing. Now you’ve expressed your disagreement with the topic/comment by agreeing with someones disagreement, and you haven’t actually provided any discussion. You “should” express your disagreement personally and with a comment, but you don’t need to. I’ve seen people do this already by looking at who has liked what comments, and looking to see if that user has commented in the threads, and let me tell you just based off observation it’s extremely common.

7. Loophole disagree
Given the above and the standard that is held towards liking things verses disliking, the first comment in every thread can be “I disagree with this.” That is 20 characters. It is not flagable as it does not disobey any of the forum rules: The post does not contain content that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or a violation of our code of conduct. The post is not inflammatory, extraneous or upsetting. The post is not an advertisement, or vandalism. It is useful or relevant to the current topic. It is not threatening to a user.
Many will argue that it “Is not useful or relevant”, but it is: It has expressed opinion. The opinion is that of disagreement. That is useful and relevant as it means that not everyone agrees with what was said. They “should” provide a reason, which is potentially more helpful, but they don’t need to.
So now someone has expressed disagreement/dislike towards the topic. Whomever else disagrees/dislikes the topic need not contribute as they can now simple like the comment that says “I disagree with this.” You’ve turned a downvote on the original comment into an upvote on a comment that represents a downvote. I have already seen examples of this on the forums, and it is slowly starting to catch on.

8. False positivity
Now, again, while people “should” respond if they disagree, and we’ve established that you can avoid discussion so long as someone else has expressed disagreement, what if no one else has? What if you’re the first person to come across the “I think Tracer would be balanced at 500 health.” thread and you disagree, but you understandably can’t be bothered to explain why such an idea is bad? Your option, which again I’ve seen bought up many times, is to “just ignore it then”, which is a fair comment. So you do. And so does the next person. And the next person. Because threads regularly don’t get replies, especially threads that are of poor topics. But then one person passes by, thinks “Yeah sure why not.”, gives it a like, a goes on to another thread. Now the original poster gets the impression that the idea is good because clearly someone has liked the idea and no one has disagreed/disliked it, otherwise they would have commented. But people did disagree/dislike it. They just couldn’t be bothered to either provide counter points or preferred not to leave a snarky comment.
Many people believe this to be positive, but it’s not. It’s false positivity. A sort of “no idea is bad” mentality. There are plenty of bad ideas, but in this case they’re less likely to be addressed in some way.

Or, alternatively as I’ve also seen, you get cases where the first post has several likes, which at a passing glance appears the idea is mildly appreciated. But a few comments in you’ll see someone completely disagreeing with the original post and that has significantly more likes, which actually shows the idea isn’t appreciated by most people. Do we really need to be several comments in to a thread before we get an accurate representation of peoples feelings towards something?

9. Hive Mind
This is the last major thing people love to bring up in regards to why downvotes are better off removed: That, supposedly, it promoted or allowed a ‘Hive Mind’ mentality to just baselessly downvote opinions. People particularly like to bring this up in regards to topics like hero balance. How exactly is giving people the ability to mass upvote something not as prone to ‘hive mind’ as giving people the ability to mass downvote something?

To use my 500HP Tracer example again, people tend to refer to ‘hive mind’ as the concept that basically anyone who isn’t a ‘Tracer main’ would downvote this idea. That anyone who isn’t a ‘Tracer main’ would go to any ‘Buff Tracer’ thread and just downvote them, regardless of what was said, because they didn’t like said hero getting a buff. But how exactly is allowing every Tracer main the ability to go to the ‘Buff Tracer’ threads and upvote any less ‘hive minded’? How is the mass agreement of something and different to the mass disagreement? And to that extent, why is ‘hive mind’ portrayed as some sort of bad thing, when all it is groups of people forming similar opinions on things? Groups of people are allowed to not like something just as much as groups of people that do like something.


Solutions
While it’s easy to point the flaws in something, I feel like there’s a few easy solutions that could be implemented in place of the old system:

1. Display both likes and dislikes
I hated how in the upvote/downvote system that an downvote cancelled out an upvote, and vice versa. 100 people could upvote something and 99 people could have downvoted it, but that displays as 1 upvote. That gives the impression that only 1 person formed and opinion on the topic, when 199 people had.
I propose that likes and dislikes should simply be displayed separately and clearly. This would accurately represent how many people have felt towards the topic.

2. Remove likes
More extreme, but if you’re going to force people who disagree with the conversation to speak, people who agree with the conversation should also have to speak. A conversation doesn’t work nearly as well when you present something to someone and all they do is nod their head. If people are going to tell you they agree, they should have to tell you why they agree.

3. Force a comment
If one of the reasons why downvotes were removed was to promote discussion, force it so that in order to disagree/dislike something, you had to leave a comment. And the same would apply for agree/likes. I’m not really in favour of this however, as I feel people will just spam they way people currently are with the 20 character limit and post this like “Here’s 20 characters to tell you I agree/disagree”.

Conclusion
Thanks for sticking with me and reading the whole thing. This took a while to put together. I do like a lot about these new forums, but this, I feel, is fundamentally flawed.

4 Likes

i dont want my feelings hurt so i didnt want dislikes

3 Likes

TL:DR.

No downvote is good because it encourages discussion now instead of lazy passive aggressive downvote and move on behavior.

If you disagree with someone, you write it out. If something is breaking forum rules, then you flag it.

Down votes served no purpose other than cheap quick access to negative actions. We don’t need that in a community which is striving to be more positive.

1 Like

No upvote is good because it encourages discussion now instead of lazy upvote and move on behavior.

If you agree with someone, you write it out.

upvotes served no purpose other than cheap quick access to positive actions. We don’t need that in a community

1 Like

The difference is how society perceives negative and positive actions. Talk to a random person and wish them a good day, and most people will think that’s a good thing. Do the same except tell them they suck, and society perceives that in a very different way.

If you disagee with the OP, but don’t have the time or inclination to provide a detailed response, upvote this post to expressy your disagreement.

If we post this after every OP, we’ll have an effective downvote system. Problem solved.

Put politely, I don’t care about what you have to say if you can’t even be bothered to reason what I said.

And I highlighted that in the post.
My comment is that isn’t actually an effective downvote system and misrepresents at a passing how people feel about the thread. You are comment number 5. Should people have to get 5 comments in to see that people disagreed?

1 Like