Downvotes versus upvotes

One thing I definitely won't miss is being downvoted for just asking a question!

Or when you comment something and you get a rain of downvotes without even one person saying why they downvoted you.

Yeah, I sometimes have stupid opinions. But how will I know why it's stupid if all y'all do is downvote me? People here are very different and would actually talk to you and explain stuff. This is mainly why I'm much more active here.
- This has a lot to do with the size of the community, at least for me. Often on Reddit I would have no idea if you were ever going to stick around to make the effort to correct you worthwhile, or if you were just someone that likes to argue endlessly because that's how you get your entertainment. It just because easier to punish and move on that to try and correct.

I think it’s natural to have a stronger reaction to bad things more than good things. There’s something called Negativity Bias and it’s kinda why rage-baiting and (bad news) articles is so prevalent is because we inherently feel a stronger reaction to those than the positive counterparts

It’s really hard to hold onto those good feelings from an accomplishment they fade quickly. But the negative ones, even minor, can stick around a long time!
- This is why therapists often highly recommend gratitude journaling. I've never been a fan of the 'gratitudec name of it, but the basic idea is you make a habit of writing down (and thus deliberately paying attention to) the positive and nice things in your life, and that counteracts negativity bias and makes you notice the good things more. Even when your current situation is awful, you can still find stuff, like a nice sunny day, or a friend giving you a compliment, or a cool fact you learned, or a tasty scone and suchlike. After a while it becomes a habit to pay more attention to positives even when you're not writing it down.

Dopamine is one hella drug.

As someone who mostly lurked what was getting 100 upvotes like?!

For me I was more bothered if something made it to the negative than anything else. That always made me feel super crummy, but sitting at 1 was fine with me.

As a fellow mostly-lurker, this is also how I felt about downvotes. For me I think it was also because of the concept of having a karma score for the account as a whole, rather only on individual comments.

I like the idea of Downvotes. The principle was a good one but it neglected to consider that people, on the whole, don’t look at vote buttons as up vote = relevant content downvote = irrelevant (their original intention, essentially crowdsourcing moderation / content quality control). Rather they look at them as agree / disagree, like / dislike.

I’m the end I think they hurt the conversation. People can just downvote with ease instead of having to put the effort in the say something, leaving that space for those who had a strong enough drive to be snippy or nasty to full it.

Upvote only still allows a mark of quality / relevance from the community without making it so divisive.

I like the Hacker News compromise - you have downvotes only after your account is a certain age and karma, and you can't downvote responses to your comments.
- Seems a fair balance!

I wasn’t a fan of Reddit’s downvote system. It was a pointless, vague way to show displeasure without actually providing any useful information. I never knew if a downvote was because I made a comment that was factually wrong, the reader had a differing opinion, or simply because I made a grammatical error. Plus, there’s brigading. By itself, a downvote doesn’t really tell you anything.

I’m sure that in at least some cases, a genuine discussion (rather than a simple downvote) would have been more thought-provoking for everyone.

If they were used as they were originally intended which was 'only downvote spam, flamebait, and other content that objectively doesn't belong there' ie not as a 'disagree' button it would have been fine but in practice nobody ever used it like that even in the olden days of Reddit. I reckon BeeHaw made the right call by disabling them.
Completely agree. At first, I though that the Reddit's voting system is great, as it aims to be somewhat similar to the approach Stack Overflow has taken, with actually helpful answers ending up at the top... which does not apply to what Reddit is, which is a forum, which is a bunch of people sharing opinions most of the time, and voting on that has never been a great idea.

Hitting an upvote or a downvote is a very basic type of engagement, a way of expressing something without having to say anything. And it's not doing much good to a forum-like platform. I've been trying to find places that don't have any vote systems, akin to the old-school forums, but I wasn't able to find anything that fit my taste or activity preferences (feel free to point to some if you know any).
- Metafilter.com has "favorites" still but is pretty good imo. It can a bit snooty sometimes, but I find interesting links and discussions on there.

I guess it depends on the post or comment. If it was something creative I posted, those down votes and criticisms sting,however any support is very helpful. If it was just a comment I made, I would usually shrug it off as "whatever."

The thing that bothered me was getting downvoted when it made absolutely no sense. When I made some book recommendations, for example.

And I'm pretty sure that in at least some cases, one or more people were following me around to downvote everything I wrote. That kind of petty malice is hard to understand.

In some subreddits, it seemed like every comment was automatically downvoted once or twice.
Agreed! There’s just no need for it. I’m glad this place is different in that regard.

I’d be annoyed for awhile then I’d remember most people used the downvote button as a dislike/disagree button, which isn’t what its meant to be used for.

Yes, I hate downvotes and I think they do not contribute to anything other than anger.

Haha, -1 is the cruelest number. Much more negative than that and you can just blame the hivemind. But the fact that just a couple of people think you’re wrong makes you really want to start explaining why they’re wrong to downvote you.

I would prefer a downvote to a needlessly rude comment in response to me, but yeah, I’m definitely not going to miss downvotes either

I usually got down voted for opinions that I held on topics like cryptocurrency. There seems to be hivemind mentality about certain topics and going against the grain on reddit is not allowed. There has obviously been a lot of bullshit around that topic specifically, but I never took the downvotes personally, I just assumed people were being to dense to try and have a reasonable discussion.

What about a new rule that does let you downvote only if you comment underneath before?

This is kinda suboptimal now that I think more about it.

you can just type a letter instead of writing why you downvote

If you aren't interested enough to write a comment you won't downvote