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

@Vree  
I’m saying that everyone freaked out over a minuscule problem on a fan site for a kids cartoon show. I’m not talking about tyranny

@tuypo1  
Speaking as one who has been a member of many art communities, it’s all about delivery. “This art is bad” isn’t helpful to anyone because it doesn’t explain why. In that way, that particular comment would be bad because it’s so vague it’s pretty much useless. What part of the drawing looks like it needs improving? The face, legs, arms, does the background look off? Even that is more useful than “it’s bad”.
 
In any given crowd, there are also always some people who cannot criticize a thing without also insulting it (rule 0). It’s entirely possible to strongly criticize a thing while being very civil.

@Marx  
Ughh… it implies that downvotes is the only or the only significant way to express [controversial] opinion.

Back to the discussion:
 
Has a karma system been suggested before? It’d % your + and - votes (add up the upvotes and divide it by your total votes) and assign the same result to you as Karma.  
If the % of downvotes surpasses a certain ratio, say 10%, then the worth of your negative votes on each picture will be reduced. Repeating every 10% until negatives from your account are above a significant ratio, say 60%+, votes from your become practically 0 value (AND even vanish from the pictures at this point.)  
You should be able to track your current “karma” on your profile. You can get out of a low karma by upvoting more pictures and removing downs, naturally.
 
I think the goal is a moderation-light solution against mass downvoting (…and other problems I haven’t caught), so identifying a “normal user” % and punishing using more could help, maybe?

@ushiki  
Didn’t seem that way but alrighty
 
@neutralgrey  
I still find it bizarre that people view this as such. but you know…Poe’s law be damned.

@Vree  
That’s pretty much the reputation system that was tried back in 2013 (or thereabouts). The little green/yellow/red boxes next to your username, that showed your upvote/downvote ratio. It didn’t live long.

@Vree  
We ran with a karma system for a week about three or four years ago. Some people instantly saw having “bad karma” as badge of honour and mass downvoted everything they could as fast as they could. Shocker, some people are jerks.

@neutralgrey  
I would if I could.
 
Only low quality posts of course.

@The Smiling Pony  
Require a certain karma to downvote.

@byte[]  
The karma system failed.

For what it’s worth, I at least use the comment count shown on thumbnails pretty frequently, because I like to quickly see if images have comments on them. I don’t use the actual button very much, though– but it’d be pretty weird for the comment count to be there without some sort of icon to accompany it.

@Nonymous  
Like yours? I see you’ve already taken the liberty of downvoting yourself

@neutralgrey  
Don’t derail this into a fight with someone.

Now we’re just over-complicating things. Just make it against the rules to complain about getting downvotes, I dunno.

Since a lot of this discussion is about legit constructive criticism I had an idea. Won’t hide it, kinda inspired by dA.
 
Add a second “comment” section on images, but only for critique. Available only if images have an artist tag (so not available on screencap pictures and such), users can write reviews and critique there and, optionally, give between 1 and 5 stars to the pic. Comments in reply to these reviews can only be posted by: the reviewer that posted it, the artist/artists involded (must have account linked to the artist tag) and site staff.
 
Comments and up/downvotes are no longer counted as critism of any sort but as nothing but random comments and user score and so won’t require as much moderation as before. Any multi-account abuse/plain rude messages affecting score, comments or critque will still be punished of course.
 
This would also help legit critique not get lost in pictures with many random comments.
 
Optional: users can toggle on and off the 5-star rating on thumbnails. I guess it’d show on the bottom of the thumbnail.

@The Smiling Pony  
The one I had in mind would not be public, only visible on your own profile. It’d only show there for the sole purpose of warning people that they were running out of downvotes to spend.
 
But it doesn’t even require that sort of slow transition. There can simply be a rule that “your downvotes can never exceed 10% of your downvotes”. That limit isn’t actually that arbitrary because you can always “earn” more as you upvote new pics.  
And again, this wouldn’t be for the sake of “forcing” people to vote one way. The purpose would be to filter out mass downtoving users, using the thesis that regular users will by their own will downvote less as a basis to differentiate between the two.
 
Well this is just one random noob’s idea, I’m sure you all have already extensively researched how other big sites generally dealt with similar questions and what type of solutions they have tested and tried.
 
@Background Pony #5C6D  
Sounds possibly workable though unlike DA, most pictures aren’t uploaded by their creators who usually don’t even visit the site, so “critiques” would be addressed to thin air.  
DA comments are addressed to the artist, DB comments are addressed to other users.

@Vree  
Not according to the staff, or they wouldn’t talk so much about criticism. Anyway it’di be a way to get more artists active here.

@Vree  
>this isn’t forcing anyone to vote one way  
>must give positive votes if you want to give negative votes at a 10 up/1 down ratio
 
K.

@Vree  
If we’re keeping downvotes as a thing, I don’t want a system that requires “spending upvotes to earn downvotes”; I’m not wanting to encourage “frivolous” upvotes, and if downvotes are kept then there would be legitimate users that could have reason to downvote more than they upvote.
 
 
For some context/timeline, whatever:
 
 
 
 
_{^{(identities of the two mods hidden because, well, I know how some people are)}}
 
It’s been an issue for years (as mentioned earlier, the karma/reputation system was even before the first of those threads), and for a group of people that are essentially digital hoarders, it’s been a frustrating problem to deal with (seeing artists quit because of downvote-related issues) and tiresome to moderate to keep things from being even worse (without the constant moderation on this matter, you’d be seeing a lot of Flash Sentry, Starlight Glimmer, and Twilicorn images in negative numbers, nevermind random ships and artists and whatever else “particularly dedicated” people take issue with).
 
The reason “this” happened as it did is a mix of the utter exhaustion with the topic leading some mods (myself included) to finally want to end it for once and for all, and a large deal of inner miscommunication regarding the goals of the change (was originally not meant to be this absolute), the change itself (done because it was the least time demanding and incurred no data loss if reverted), its announcement (or as you noticed, the lack of), and eventual rollout (aka sudden). Timezones and working hours across three continents are a bitch, as is just being tired.
 
If nothing else, at least a few people may now realize that there is a problem.
 
And people are now working on solutions that include image hiding and try to ameliorate the issues caused by downvoting without removing or vanishing it which we’re hoping will please people.

I can’t remember whether you’ve admitted that vote system didn’t work as intended since the very beginning because it turned out to be counterintuitive for lot of fair users (i prefer the word “innocent”).

@The Smiling Pony  
>hateful and stupid opinions
 
What a hatefully stupid thing to say.

@Nonymous  
Thank you for your important contribution.
 
The guy wasn’t talking about “this particular image is bad/offends me” people, but the sort that will downvote all 50 images from an artist regardless of quality or content type just because they had the “wrong opinion” about Fallout 2 in a tumblr post, or the last 100 images of Spike x Ember because the tag count is inching in on their Spike x Sweetie Belle ship. That sort of voting behaviour says nothing about the image and is just done to spite the artist, the people that like the content, or attempt to get people to stop liking things they don’t like because they’re incapable of accepting different opinions exist and just hiding a tag.

@The Smiling Pony  
No problem, I do it for free.

@Nonymous  
If you’re not going to contribute to this thread in any way other than memes and barbs, I’d ask you to stop. Some people here do actually want to have a discussion that goes somewhere productive.

@Rod Hungwell  
trouble with that, is it in effect is a restriction against legitimate producers of content largely for the sake of people who abuse a system. that’s not going to do the site any favors.