Would any of you be against the removal of the down voting system?

One thing to notice about that, on more than one thread where discussions about the Go Next Epidemic took place recently, comments from new accounts started showing up, accounts with no avatar and a post count of 1-4, and immediatly started insulting people and being as toxic as they could, until the comments got removed by moderation. This COULD be people who never wanted to comment here before but got particularly salty after the latest developer update, but I think it's also quite likely those were people who were already forum users, but created those new accounts so they could downvote more and also insult other people without risking having their main account banned here. So people may indeed already be abusing the downvote system like that.

I oppose removing it - it provides a way of giving more granular feedback than just upvotes alone.

If I see an argument, I'll upvote things I agree with but not downvote unless I think a point is particularly off-base. Sometimes I'll reply to explain why, but sometimes the explanation already exists, so posting would be redundant. Even in those situations, though, I still think the distinction between "not good point" and "actively bad point" is important

I’m indifferent about the down vote button. Idc if it stays or goes.

Reply button has its purpose. Not everything or everyone should warrant an actual explanation. Look what meaningful information would be lost, as I glanced and noticed the initial post has an equal 24 to 24 of up and down votes which shows it has a very balanced up and down votes. It's way more coward to want it removed.

Define "abused"?

As I feel a lot of people define 'abuse' as anything that doesn't just concede to them or agree with their point of view. It's kind of like the 'anyone I disagree with is Hitler' thing.

I like the dislike button, it makes it clear how most people feel about things and I have been downvoted into oblivion myself. I may not like it but I would rather know the majority disagrees with me, rather than delude myself

Downvote this post, thank you.

Oh, you think downvoting is your ally. But you merely adopted the downvote; I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see an upvote until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!

They don't work here and should just go.

On large forum sites that are built around a voting system (e.g. Reddit), it can work pretty well. Downvotes basically act as a way for communities to moderate themselves. Trolls, spam, bots etc. get downvoted and hidden from view. They're still there if you want to seek them out, but they don't excessively clutter the feed. Sometimes legitimate users do get caught in the crossfire, whether that's a tolerable side-effect is up for debate.

The system does have two pretty big caveats though:

• Scale: There's a minimum number of users needed to make the system fair. Where communities are small, the range of opinions held is often narrow, which means users with unpopular opinions effectively get ousted from the space. In a larger community, it's more likely there'll be at least some other people who share the opinion. Personally, I don't think the DbD forums are big enough. Most of the posts here get voted on by a small pool of regular users as opposed to a representative sample of the community at large. It's pretty obvious some people around here also have personal vendettas, because a lot of completely innocuous posts/comments end up with downvotes for the sole reason that they were posted by a controversial figure.

• Bandwagoning: People have a tendency to vote with the majority. It's really easy to see a post with downvotes and subconsciously think "If everyone else deemed it bad, then it must be," and hit the downvote button too. Which is why Reddit hides vote counts for the first couple of hours after a post is made, so people react with their actual thoughts and not someone else's. This is another point where the DbD forums fall short. It's pretty easy to predict how a post will fare here after seeing the reaction it gets first.

Lol and even this comment got downvoted