Critique instead downvote

I think it would help artists if there would be a form for making a critique instead anonymous downvotes. This really rather attracts haters, at least the artist won’t know what’s wrong and can’t improve. By being anonymous it only supports haters and you won’t know if it’s only always just the same, or if there really is something wrong and what.
 
There are mostly way less downvotes than upvotes, but as author you still would like what made one dislike it so much, ignoring it isn’t enough.

it’s called the comment section.

@ZippySqrl
 
It seems you didn’t read.

@Background Pony #D658  
Removing the votes won’t make people comment more. It’s just useful for searches mostly.

@Background Pony #D658  
We tried removing downvotes once.
 
It didn’t work too well.

@SuperSupermario24
 
What exactly didn’t worked well? In which way?
 
I don’t disagree with downvotes, but with giving them anonymous without the need to give a comment/reason/critique. Haters won’t be able to give a reasonable argument, it helps the artist and the viewers to see what has been disliked, since there is a maiority of pictures with downvotes for no visible reason.
 
Personal taste or hate shouldn’t be a reason to downvote, with the need of giving a comment and those being not anonymous it would make like 60% of them stop too.
 
I’ve seen artists just starting drawing and it really only discourages them. It adds nothing positive, like constructive critique would. Disabling if not implementing it would be still better than with, if a picture really isn’t good or offending, it won’t get upvotes anyway.

 
P.S. Why are you anonymous here? Doesn’t that kinda go counter to your own point?  
P.P.S. Also, it will reduce amount of downvotes by maybe half, and that’s very optimistic. 95% of the remainder will be even worse on artists’ motivation, being downvotes-but-now-they-have-to-have-comment-attached; here’s a sample of what these comments will be: “.”, “downvoted”, “-”, “your art is trash”.

@Barhandar  

 
And it’s obviously only hate then, something you can ignore, but such critique comments should have a minimum length too. Just wrting „downvoted“ would be rather just spam.
 
DeviantArt has a great solution for that.

@Background Pony #D658  
except then comment sections will just be spam, thus making it harder to find any potentially helpful comments. Plus, a large many artist will be discouraged when they see “trash pic” all over their pics

@Oatsy
 
As i said, minimum length would prevent this one word spam. I don’t know how it’s handled now, but doesn’t frequent spammers get warned / banned?

@Background Pony #D658  

I think you have no experience of being an artist who would be discouraged by downvotes, a number that carries far less effort than commenting negatively.  

“.” repeated to meet the minimum length criterion. More things added to fix issues with the proposition just means proposition has more issues than current system, and they’re obvious even before it’s implemented.  

DA is a (supposedly) personal art gallery and not a booru; in addition to being a hugbox that can’t take either negativity or art being shared and admired elsewhere (hence why so many DA artists are on the DNP).
 
Also, I repeat the question. If you’re so against anonymous downvotes, why are you anonymous here?

@Background Pony #D658  
Minimum length won’t make people more constructive, it’ll just make people add filler until they’ve met the requirement.
 
Like, on the new Overwatch forums, there’s a 20-character minimum on posts, but you quite frequently see one-word posts followed by “20 characters” or something along those lines just to meet the requirement. Hell, even Jeff Kaplan, one of the game devs, did it once.
 
Also, to actually answer the question, by “didn’t go well” I mean fucking massive arguments. Like, seriously, just look through these threads (those are 4 different links) to get an idea. It didn’t last an entire 24 hours before getting reverted.

@Barhandar
 
Please don’t take a claim as argument, you have made your point, no need to continue repeating it.
 
Repeating dots or words can be easily filtered, i’m also rather speaking of critiques separate from comments.
 

 
This has literally nothing to do with what this is all about. And it’s only a suggestion, i’m a software engineer myself and have several years experience in developing social platforms. I’m not telling i know better, just a suggestion, nothing more. I know how toxic this fandom can be, and how easily some get triggered without reason.
 
It rather gives the trolls/haters an easy tool, or what’s the actual purpose of downvotes? If a picture is really bad, it wouldn’t get any or much upvotes anyway, i don’t see the need for having a red anonymous count that even goes negative (lol). Disqus for example has a donvote too influencing the ranking, but the number isn’t visible.

@SuperSupermario24  
That’s why i asked if there are warnings/bans for frequent spamming.

@Background Pony #D658  
“trash pic”  
click post  
Message appears:“Minimum length is 25 characters”  
“trash pic trash pic trash pic trash pic trash pic trash pic trash pic trash pic trash pic”  
click post
 
 
Plus this also bans posts that are like  
“<3”  
“nice”

@Oatsy  
As i said, filtering repeating words is simple, if it’s spam then it’s spam.. that issue you think is nothing but the same as with regular comments.
 
But at least you see it’s just obvious spam that can be deleted, nothing wrong with the picture.
 
Edit: as i mentioned, i’m not speaking of regular comments, i mean separate critique forms, maybe with stars for example. If no one wants to hear this suggestion you can close this topic, i didn’t expected much anyway.

@Background Pony #D658  
How do you expect your hypothetical system to work for images that are genuinely trash, or downvote bait?  
Something like >>1448990, for example, do you expect people to write out a well thought out essay everytime they want to downvote such an image?

@Background Pony #D658  
Sure, but detecting that automatically is hard to automate and easy to circumvent.
 
Either way, it’s just asking for more spam.

@Background Pony #E32E  
Of course not, you just won’t give it attention/upvotes. Downvotes are just toxic, if something is really only offending it should be rather reported.
 
People seem to argue a lot against a solution, but i don’t see arguments/justification for having downvotes. If the toxic part of the fandom starts crying about that it should be ignored, to be honest.
 
@Oatsy  
So you basically say the argument for having downvotes is to “prevent” spam? I don’t think if there is a strict warning/temp/perma ban system users would act that anarchic.

@Background Pony #D658  
there’s a difference between shitty or just downvote bait and something that’s offensive.
 
A pic of like, iunno, Twilight Sparkle fawning over Justin Bieber isn’t reportable.
 
Downvotes are mostly used for searching. They’re misused somewhat on fetish pics, but eh, not fixable without basically an AI removing votes and banning people.
 

 
Downvotes aren’t to prevent spam, but requiring a comment to downvote is encouraging spam. Anywya, there’ s already a warning/ban system in place. It definitely hasn’t stopped people from being assholes :v

@Background Pony #D658  
there is no “perfect” system, unfortunately. the critique system works on paper, but so do downvotes. in reality, i feel like most critiques would just boil down to “this sucks”, “i hate this”, “kill yourself”, “quit drawing”, etc. in that regard, a red number (due to it’s meaningless anonymity) is less scathing; i feel as if artists would be much less turned off by a red -15 than they would by a few harsh but honest comments. right now it largely works; we have measures in place to prevent downvote spamming, and on the whole not as many people abuse it as you’d imagine.
 
for artists looking for critiques, we have the art forums with a dedicated sfw and a nsfw thread. even putting “critiques welcome” or something to that affect in the image description would probably get some replies in the comments.

@DanielTepesKraus  
Your examples of „critiques“ should be prohibited by default and counted as spam. Those doing that several times - ban.
 
If this ban system would be strict enough, the system would actually have people under control, not vice versa.

@Background Pony #D658  
except then people saying “you shouldn’t tell someone to kill themselves” would be banned. Regexing anything to anything for exceptions causes way more problems than it’s worth.
 
Look, you’re trying to solve a non-problem. People aren’t going to suddenly post better comments. They’re just going to leave and then artists are going to get less attention to their work.

@Oatsy  
In the posts that have been linked the staff clearly says the downvote is only abused.
 
To me this looks like it’s got sweeped under the carpet, while the toxic part of people has won. As i said, i won’t do anything, it’s just a suggestion to solve an obvious problem (again).
 
If someone makes a critique with „you suck“, this is an obvious insult/spam that can be reported and removed. Anonymous downvote only protects the hater.

@Background Pony #D658  
They can be reported and removed. That doesn’t stop artists obsessively monitoring the comments from seeing them though.
 
Anyway, it’s not been swept under the rug so much as it’s just been handled more.