I’m firmly in the pro-downvote camp. Downvotes give users a quick and easy way of providing some basic feedback to artists and, far more importantly, serves to show other users the potential lack of quality an image may have–especially useful for comics/gifs/high res images where thumbnails aren’t great at showing an image off.
I’ve skimmed the thread, so perhaps I’ve missed some stuff, but the anti-downvote arguments I’ve seen seem really lacking:
>Artists leave the site
Unfortunate, but if artists are so fragile they can’t deal with a small red number at the top of the page on the horse art website they’re on, they’re not going to take actual comments well–especially if the “trolls” can’t just downvote anymore and have to leave a comment. I’ve seen more than a few fanfic writers have huge “delete all their stories” meltdowns over some negative comments and I doubt fan artists are any different.
Downvotes aren’t fulfilling their intended purpose
I went and checked the site rules (which really should be in the header and not the footer hardly anyone looks at) and Rule 6 appears to be the one that covers downvotes. “Do not indiscriminately downvote images based on their tags and/or content.” really doesn’t cover the intended purpose, though. The use of “indiscriminately” in particular gives the impression the rule’s covering brigating/mass downvoting. No where is quality or utter shitposting mentioned.
It really confuses me what the admins thought users would do. The rule seems to cover a specific type of downvoting and that’s even assuming the average user’s going to scroll halfway down the rules page in the footer and read it. When has “downvote” ever meant “something that’s obviously shitposting?” To a normal person, downvote means “something I don’t like.” It’s not shocking users use it the way it’s used in virtually every other context. I also find it odd upvote still seems to mean “something I like” but downvote got this highly specific definition that was never really clarified to users.
>It requires too much moderation
Honestly, this seems to be the main reason based on some comments in the thread. If mass downvoting is a massive issue, the obvious solution is to limit its ability, perhaps through a hard cap that limits the number of downvotes someone can give per day. A simpler solution is to just increase the size of the moderation team–even have a few mods solely dedicated to dealing with the downvote issue if its so bad. Throwing the baby out with the bath water just seems like a really poor decision. Mods and admins will always have to moderate the site and deal with rule violations. Eliminating site features because you don’t want to deal with that isn’t right. You might tas well get rid of the comments and forums too.
