I honestly think its too early to decide whether we should change the downvote system or not. For the most part, I feel it works fine the way it does, and even though we've had an influx of downvotes due to the number of new users from reddit, I feel most of the people from there will either adapt to the culture here over time, or move over to a site that they'd be more comfortable at like voat.
There are always going to be people who downvote for petty reasons, and they'll make there distaste known no matter how many roadblocks you put in front of it. Its ultimately up to the community on whether we encourage it or not. We can usually tell when a post deserves downvotes or not, and usually when a post gets wrongfully downvoted, we can tell just by looking at the content and the numbers.
I feel its better to call out this behavior when it happens, rather than change the rules for everyone. Say I'm running a tribe, and I see an influx of downvotes in recent posts. I thinks its far more civil and fair to the users to open up a discussion about it, rather than place restrictions on all users. I never think its a good idea to let the abusers set the direction for how things are run.
And finally, I feel some of the suggestions being thrown around have the potential to be ineffective or even harmful. Making reasons mandatory can be bypassed simply by lying, and Identifying downvoters would could not only put people on the spot, but also set them up for retaliation. If the downvote problem does get out of hand, we could turn the downvote button into a spam button, or just get rid of it all together, but for the time being I wouldn't mess with it.
I honestly think its too early to decide whether we should change the downvote system or not. For the most part, I feel it works fine the way it does, and even though we've had an influx of downvotes due to the number of new users from reddit, I feel most of the people from there will either adapt to the culture here over time, or move over to a site that they'd be more comfortable at like voat.
There are always going to be people who downvote for petty reasons, and they'll make there distaste known no matter how many roadblocks you put in front of it. Its ultimately up to the community on whether we encourage it or not. We can usually tell when a post deserves downvotes or not, and usually when a post gets wrongfully downvoted, we can tell just by looking at the content and the numbers.
I feel its better to call out this behavior when it happens, rather than change the rules for everyone. Say I'm running a tribe, and I see an influx of downvotes in recent posts. I thinks its far more civil and fair to the users to open up a discussion about it, rather than place restrictions on all users. I never think its a good idea to let the abusers set the direction for how things are run.
And finally, I feel some of the suggestions being thrown around have the potential to be ineffective or even harmful. Making reasons mandatory can be bypassed simply by lying, and Identifying downvoters would could not only put people on the spot, but also set them up for retaliation. If the downvote problem does get out of hand, we could turn the downvote button into a spam button, or just get rid of it all together, but for the time being I wouldn't mess with it.