Debate thread: About downvoting (modnote:no, not being removed again)

Let’s have a friendly little debate about this most pressing issue.
 
Just remember; keep it civil. No personal attacks, ad hominems, etc. Being a jerk is not how you explain yourself. Besides, we don’t want this thread locked because things got out of hand.
 
Let’s begin, shall we?

My initial inclinations were in favor of keeping the downvote, but reading the mods explanation, I can see why they did it.
 
I think there’s already an official thread for discussing this, though.

@WatermelonRat  
Both of them were locked because people were less than civil about it.

I don’t think posting a thread about this topic ATM is a good idea. If the political threads are anything to go by, mods don’t like it when people try to make new threads on a topic that already had it’s thread closed.
 
Anyway, I’m against Downvotes.
 
 
@WatermelonRat  
It’s locked now.

If that’s the case, maybe restarting the discussion right away isn’t the greatest idea.

Hide policy is too soft. If enought people sees a disturbing picture, they downvote it below a certain level, so a few people could see it anymore. But without downvotes this system brokes, everything disturbing will be upvoted. Thank, I already saw how YouTube works, where thumbs down is just an icon and doesn’t do anything.
 
Replacing downvotes or disabling its feature means that you can’t vote, VALUATE the art. The idea of the vote itself becomes meaningless because you’re literally not allowed to downvote. I don’t think it’s a clever idea. I don’t want to live in the world where no one can do anything negative towards someone’s work if it is indeed offends too many people (or anyone, you know, democracy, every person counts).
 
The other side effect is that I don’t want to see something that is lower than ~~4, just like I put it in the settings. Meaning that someone forgot to add a tag which is hidden by my filter, I will see it on front page. Judging by this logic, let’s remove tags entirely, because they are too often forgotten. What I’m trying to say is that REMOVING the feature ~~ IS NOT a solution. “hide” feature would be good as a standalone thing. Just please don’t let people upvote anything disturbing. As much as several people can use twinks to downvote good stuff, they can also UPVOTE crappy stuff.
 
By removing downvotes you’re destroying balance and giving сarte blanche to all the trolls to bring MS Paint picture into top list.

If I had to pick I’d say I’m with the mods. Besides the hide feature is more useful that the downvote.

My two cents on this issue: no matter which way it swings in the end, having the hide button there is an excellent idea. I personally don’t filter anything just because I look for quality art in any form, and I may miss some if I do. I’m really not offended by anything, I just ignore what I don’t like.
 
Many people though also prefer to not filter things based on tags because of a similar thing, but may still find a specific image disturbing and may not be so easily able to ignore it, and giving people the option to hide a single image with a click of a button is a great idea.
 
So… yeah, you do you, but the hide button is a great idea that I’d like to see stick around for those who wish to make use of it.

FOR.  
removing downvote messes with the image rating.  
using downvote is easier then posting loads of comments on stuff. just hit downvote from thumbnails.

I’m going to say this: if we absolutely HAVE to have downvotes around, then the very LEAST that could be done to prevent the issues mentioned in the main thread is to force people who downvote images to ALSO leave a comment explaining WHY they did it, and mark their comment with “This person downvoted this image”.
 
If you can’t provide a GOOD reason for why you downvoted, then have a fun time being reported for being a douche.

Has “x downvotes per (day/week/month) for each IP address” been considered as an option?
 
Hide button’s a good idea. Controversial stuff aside, sometimes something is just really disturbing but there’s not a tag for it - just a particular image - and you don’t want to keep seeing it.
 
Downvotes are definitely abused quite a bit, but this would change the dynamics of things quite a bit. For example, grimdark images will get much better overall scores now - anything controversial, really, where one group doesn’t like it and another group does.
 
This goes both ways - Aryanne and Pride images will both get higher scores. As will grimdark things. MS Paint stuff will get better scores. When someone drops like 20 meh-quality wrestling pics in a row those will have better score.
 

 
@ZuTheSkunk  
Interesting idea. You’ll see a lot of stupid comments, but there’ll be lots of time-outs and having their downvote removed until they learn. But then it’ll be a hazy issue if “lol Flashlight” is a legitimate “reason” comment.

@ZuTheSkunk  
I agree with you. Usually there’s not many people who downvotes stuff, it can be easily seen who did it.  
As an alternative to “leave a comment” they could select the reason why exactly they downvoted the picture. Like it works in nearly any multiplayer game.
 

exactly the reason why I think it is a bad idea

@neutralgrey  
#NotAllMods

Where can I find the Mod’s explanation?
 
(I’m sorta for not having it. It can be offputting when someone downvotes for no apparent reason. Make’s me wonder what it was that was wrong… the quality of art? Not enough skill? Bad content? Wrong tags?)

@SJArt117  
here

artists should never be allowed to know when people don’t like their work. if they’re terribly unpopular and don’t even realize they’re driving people away from them, that’s good, because it’s better that they’re forgotten, censored and marginalized than to ever have a chance to improve, or a warning. thus we should make giving those warnings as difficult as possible.
 
I am against downvotes. if you don’t like a picture, obviously you don’t want to spend a lot of time looking at it and thinking about it. that’s why we need to force commenters to take some time to look at pictures they already don’t like and compose a well thought out criticism. combined with how criticism that upsets people is a bannable offense, no one will never bother leaving any criticism at all.
 
clearly downvotes cause severe injury, when someone’s sadistic torture porn goes into the red and it hurts their feelings. this is a huge problem that we have to take administrative action to destroy downvotes forever.
 
and of course artists who seek downvotes are evil villains who don’t count as people.

I seriously think that removing downvotes is a step in the wrong direction. Sure they’re abused, but so are the comments. Trolls will be trolls.
 
Downvotes definitely help to sort out content designed specifically to insult people. They’re used for it very often, and they’re effective. More sites need to have them as a feature.

Oh em gee, there are so many valid points on the post that I thought were just me being anxious.  
“ There are literally hundreds of active users that have 2 or 3 accounts for whatever reason, and way too many of them have fallen into the temptation of downvoting an image with more than one, nevermind the too-many instances of people setting up dozens (or hundreds, as has happened several times) of accounts exclusively to mass downvote images.”
 
I’m on the DNP list as someone made a bunch of accounts just to downvote all my partner’s and my own artwork.
 
@Background Pony #93CC  
Thank you!

I think it would be funny if they required you to comment in order to downvote.

I hoped you were kidding… This is idealistic look at things.
 
Life isn’t sunshine and lullabies, sometimes people don’t like your art for a reason. And you can greatly benefit from their critics. Every artist has fans and haters, you can’t just pretend that the second half doesn’t exist. Real world doesn’t work like this. And this isn’t a kindergarden. Take everyone’s critic with a grain of salt and become a better artist.

A strong artistic argument to keep the downvote:
 

 
If you’re about not hurting artist’s feelings, consider for a second how it must make the artist of that Twilight image feel to know they got a lower score than that one on the left…
 
@xargos32  

 
+1
 
 
@SJArt117  
You’re right in that that’s wrong - if it really is just something personal they have against you. A good test for that might be uploading something under a different alias or even just anonymous - or a few pictures - and see how they do, assuming the style’s not too recognizable.
 

 
So, of the options listed here, downvoting/hiding is the best IMO (last option).
 
But I’d also like to add one: I think a limited number of downvotes per period of time for each IP is a good idea.
 
Maybe even something like “edit reason” but required to have at least 20 characters or so, and instead of being a comment (to keep comments section from being swamped with criticism), appears on a list that only shows up if you click the downvote arrow. This also removes anonyminity from downvoting. And if someone types jibberish for the reason, you know to ban them from downvoting for a while or something.
 
Yes, people can still abuse that with [REDACTED], but people can evade bans with that, as well, that doesn’t mean you remove banning because banning is vital to keep the site from being swamped with spamming whatevers.
 
Similarly, I think the image I posted above is a great example of why downvotes are needed…
 

 
From an objective, analytical perspective, a system with only upvotes is inherently broken. You will get a better score if you upload on Friday night, no matter what the image is. It is impossible, then, to use upvotes to compare images, since they are completely ruined by depending almost entirely on how many people are on at the time you upload.
 
You will continue to get images like the one above - people who upload on Tuesday at 3am will get scores like 5 for something much better than what will get a score of 20 or even 50 on a Friday night, merely because more people see it.
 
Meanwhile, by having downvotes, you at least create a system more dependent on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, which depends considerably less on the day of the week.
 

 
And as someone who’s had stuff voted horribly… If someone doesn’t understand why a grimdark murder image receives a terrible score, they need to. I’ve actually made some grimdark stuff before, got horribly voted - but I don’t mind, if you’re going to make grimdark then you need to understand why people vote so badly, and take it well when you understand they downvoted because your sad image made them feel, which is the point of art.
 
This applies to political stuff, too. You aren’t some hero like MLK if everyone agrees with you. If you get a terrible score, it should make you proud you’re not bowing to society’s whims. Either that, or understand your art is bad or people just don’t like mixing sociopolitics with ponies.
 
If people hate you and attack you for your views, then you’re in good company. Some downvotes are nothing compared to the heroes who were thrown in jail or killed for campaigning their beliefs.

To be honest i don’t care, but i hope they never ever put up/downs system for comments, now that actually can cause direct damage to the persons and can be abused to hell and back.

One of my favourite things about Derpibooru is how comprehensive the metadata is, and I consider an image’s public reception to be just one insightful metric among others. Without downvotes, upvotes lose any context they had. You can’t differentiate between an image that is received negatively and one that simply hasn’t gotten many views. I think downvotes serve an important purpose. If there is a problem with a well-intentioned system I’d prefer it to be fixed rather than done away with.

For
 
The reality of the situation is that no system is perfect and they are all subject to flaws and abuse. There is no getting around that. I feel the positive aspects of the down vote outweigh the negatives though. As long as it is in place, truly terrible and even trollish works are getting the attention they deserve (bad attention). Even if your art isn’t inherently bad, if you are touching on a controversial subject or depicting a fetish that people consider gross or weird then some negative attention is part for the course and to be expected. That’s life, and I say that as someone who writes disgusting fics on Fimfiction and is used to receiving a lot if downvotes simply for the subject matter I write about rather than the quality of the work. People just need to keep in mind that everything is relative to the art that is similar to it, and factor that into their minds when looking at the like to dislike ratio. Some types of art will attract up votes and other types will attract downvotes, but in the end it is how the works within those types relate to each other that truly reflects how well they are received by their intended audience.

Personally, I still think that downvotes should be brought back, but with a “reason” thing. Me, as an artist, would find that invaluable, because it means I would get actually critique (even if it’s something as simple as “bad art”, though it’d make me feel better if I had 17 downvotes of “not my fetish” and 3 of “bad art” instead of 20 that say nothing). The reason would also give artists something to improve on, but also wouldn’t make downvoters feel the obligation to justify themselves for downvoting, like they would if they were forced to comment.