If you are saying something is wrong, you need to support that with some reason or your disagreement doesn’t deserve the weight of its pixels.
If you have no body to your disagreement or you aren’t willing to participate in the discussion, even by way of dissent, then no need to take up any space among people who are will do do so.
The forum format needs people to interact with each other’s positions and opinions. If you don’t want to do that then just read along and jump in when you have a contribution.
Who is measuring it?
Just because you say something doesn’t mean anyone will read it.
But that’s the chance you take
The forum promises you the chance to contribute. It doesn’t promise people will treat you well for it.
But I like to imagine all contributions have SOME worth. Even those with whom I disagree.
So I always try to summon up the decency to spend more that a few keystrokes on addressing them or else I stay out of it entirely in favor of those that do want to contribute in return.
Official wow statment from Ornyx: “We originally added this feature as a means for players to assist with forum moderation by upvoting helpful posts and downvoting inappropriate or toxic posts. In practice, however, we found that it was primarily being used for things like downvoting a post simply because they disagreed with it, which was not the intent, and too often led to different opinions getting unfairly buried. Moving to an upvotes-only environment will remove this unintended abuse, while still allowing players to give recognition to posts that have a positive impact on the World of Warcraft community.”
it was being abuse because people downvoted just for disagreeing with someone and it got out of hand, hence why it was removed. if they bring it back, then this will just happen again.
Blizzard. Lore said in a Q&A a long time ago that they looked at likes when they considered what questions they were going to use. He didn’t explain if they considered disagreement with those likes, and players almost always critique them afterward for the filler questions they address, and yet it keeps happening. There is only one Q&A I can remember that gave players actual insight.
So you are saying that there is some possibility that Blizzard is gathering topics for Q&As based on likes without considering the state of dissent on the topic.
Okay, I can understand that.
In that case though, isn’t it even more important to have informed dissent from the OP?
How sad would it be to have a good idea buried because all the trolls had to do was click the “disagree” button.
Requiring some brand of stated dissent excises a huge chunk of the troll community as they just trudge on to lower hanging fruit. And then the information in the thread informs interested parties who can see both how many people liked it AND the arguments posed against the premise.
I would think both those were needful components to understanding the community’s real stance on any given topic.
There’s no reason for a dislike button. It offers nothing of gain to anybody, it only encourages dogpiling and negativity. If you don’t like a post, downvoting it doesn’t give constructive criticism or an argument. You can do that by replying to their post.
Only in some other land, far, far away. All the Q/As that have been held for the past 6 years have featured cherry-picked, pre-chewed topics that receive pre-regurgitated responses and none of those topics were heavily “upvoted” on the forums.
In fact, Blizzard Q/As typically avoid addressing any meaningful issues that are genuinely important to players.
Having a post buried by dislikes is basically showing the people on the forums that you don’t know what you are talking about and attracts trolls to dislike posts just because the options is there, which is what bizzard is trying to avoid. But if you think that bringing back the dislike system is gonna changed anything (which it won’t) then i can’t wait for it to come back one day (if it does) only to be shut down again.