In their absence, flags have become the default “I disagree” option for many people within these forums with the weak “justification” needed for flagging someone, especially the “trolling” flag, which is so vague that it’s basically impossible for it to be actually misused.
Flags should be reserved purely for threads that actually warrant moderator attention, and abusing them should be bannable.
RL threats, racism, sexism, and so on, are all things that justify flagging a post.
Someone having a dumb opinion you disagree with does not.
TLDR: Bring back downvotes. Make the requirements for burying a post with flags much stricter and also ban people who abuse flags.
As it has been said many times before, is it just as easy to troll and abuse the downvote system as it is the flagging system. If you dislike a post, just ignore it or flag it if it seems inappropriate.
How can downvotes be abused any more than flags though?
If I don’t like a post, I downvote it. If enough people don’t like it, it gets buried. It accomplishes the exact same community pseudo-moderation that flagging currently does, with the main difference being that it leaves the flagging system to act as what it should be, in a way to bring specific posts to Blizzards attention.
Which I suppose is my main point. All having the default “disagreement” system be the actual reporting system does is muddy the waters for Blizzard and make moderation harder, because there’s almost no way to discern between a post being buried because people disagreed with it, and one being buried because it actually broke rules.
In an ideal world where all people behaved in a mature manner, maybe. However, the number of internet trolls and (although I dislike the word) snowflakes greatly outweigh people such as yourself and are thus more likely to misuse a downvote system.
It’s literally a “I don’t like this post” button. If enough people don’t like it, it gets buried.
All having a post being buried accomplishes is greying it out and making you click a little warning that says “this post got buried, wanna read it anyway?”
The entire topic is readable, Timbo can still post freely. People just buried his post with flags (specifically RL threat flags, which have a far lower threshold, meaning it only needs like half a dozen flags to bury it).
I would argue that the current system gives even more power to bury people based on minority opinion. It only takes a few flags to hide people if you use the RL threat option.
You can have literally hundreds of people agreeing with you, but it only takes a small handful willing to abuse the flag system to bury you.
Sigh. You’ve gotta be dense to not know how people can misuse a downvote system to bury literally any post that they do not like or agree with even if it voices a legitimate opinion. I understand forums are not always the epitome of free speech but that doesn’t mean anyone and everyone should be given a free pass to profess their dislike as easily as pressing a button.
If you truly disagree or dislike someone’s post or opinion, respond to it with sufficient reasoning to show your disapproval. And if you cannot muster the energy to do the same, then perhaps your disapproval was not important enough to be worth spending even 2 minutes on.
Seriously it’s the likes that are making society so polarized. Everyone want’s their likes and best way to do that is to pick an extreme.
A logical and reasoned middle of the road approach to something just makes everyone mad for not fully committing to their team. So society has been learning step by step what gets the most likes and it’s not a balance approach.
Nah, downvotes just made an echo chamber from people too worried to “break the mold” of whats gamer acceptable. People would down vote things like more customization options and that would get bumped down and not talked about.
They should just remove the hidden thing when something gets flagged.
They removed downvotes because they’re not used the way they’re meant to. Reddit suffers from the same problem. People can’t handle things like it. They did the right thing. As for flagging posts it just shows what I’m talking about, people will always be people.
