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Under review

Downvote Solution?

Michael Rozsa 13 years ago updated by Sarah 13 years ago 5
No one wants to lose the downvote button. If you want to submit a caption without a downvote button go to 9Gag and have a blast. Half the fun is seeing how other people like/dislike your comment. With that said, I think we could stop chronic downvoting syndrome by making it a tiny bit less anonymous as to who is downvoting what. People sometimes hate on downvoters because they feel targeted and like their comment deserved more, but in all honesty there are shitty captions that dont deserve upvotes. So if we could Look at each caption and there could be a link saying "'so and so' downoted this caption" i think that it could solve a lot of the anonymity issue with downvoters. With less anonymity they would lose confidence in their will to downvote. Another solution would be to have a bar next to that person's submitted caption that shows a ratio of how many captions they liked vs disliked on that picture. Just some ideas to play around with, imgur. love you all and i don't want to see the dislike button removed!
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One person posted in a caption that maybe downvoting should be tied to reputation, like upvoting is. This would mean that if someone downvotes someone else, then they would also lose reputation points. This might make people choose more carefully when deciding to downvote every other caption to boost their own.
That's definitely a good idea. Its discouraging to get downvoted into the netherrealms when you feel like it was a decent caption. I guess we'll have to wait and see what the admins do about it.
Answer
Under review
+1
I've been thinking about something like this for a while too, but I'm not sure revealing your identity would be such a great move. I think it would be quite easy to make someone 'hate' you if you downvote them (legitimately or not) a couple of times, and they could just create an alternative account and attack your rep with it as 'revenge'. I for one never write comments that I think are bad or overly insulting, and I think it would be hard for me not to feel just a little animosity towards someone who downvoted my comment once that person was identified to me.
Well, Chris, I did offer a second solution at the end there. To keep anonymity we shouldn't let people know exactly who downvoted who. But what if when you hovered your cursor over a person's caption it would pop up with a pie chart showing how many captions that person upvoted vs. how many they downvoted on that particular photo. That way you could see their overall contribution vs. their desire to downvote others to make their comment look better. Ya see what i mean?
oh yeah, now I see what you mean. Yeah I think that would be pretty good :) Perhaps for ease of implementation, a simple tooltip showing the quantity upvotes and downvotes they've made on that image, but I like the idea