It's shit simple. Were [voat] users really this autistic? Do you really need a negative number next to someone's post to help you think?
If you see a fakenews CNN article with 100 upvotes seconds after it is posted, yes, it is helpful to easily visually identify forum sliding by the users that have downvoted the content. It might not appear as "spam" but it is nonetheless obstructive.
As far as pol being "fully anonymous", that's completely irrelevant to the upvote/downvote system
Username continuity is why the system is important here but not at 4chan.
As far as I'm concerned it's very, very simple.
OK.
I think I can visually identify that by looking at the fake news CNN article and thinking, "this is dumb".
Besides, what's more common, that scenario, or boomers and fags with alts downvoting your entire comment history because you made them mad?
Old message boards never needed this upvote downvote gay system either and they worked fine.
I think I can visually identify that [myself]
You have a % chance of identifying bad content for what it is. There is a % chance of failure in each instance. If all you see is a frontpage flooded with upvoted bad content, you significantly raise the odds of digesting bad content. But you can increase the chance for avoiding bad content by a communal identification of mischievous actors. The flare "suspicious user" used here is one of the ways to do this (centralised regulation through admin/mods/AI). Downvotes are another (community driven regulation). You could have both. The more correctly the features are applied, the better the quality of content that users will encounter. It is important to train these controls.
You can exclude a downvote system, but trying to repurpose downvotes into something else is going to give you a bad time. Time after time you'll see new users downvoting outside of the scope of your repurposing. If a forum maintainer gets kicks out of shaming new users, more power to them I guess. But if the forum maintainers are sick of looking at threads complaining about how repurposing downvoting doesn't make sense, it's probably time to rethink the design and undo that repurposing.
Besides, what's more common, that scenario, or boomers and fags with alts downvoting your entire comment history because you made them mad?
There still have to be design considerations for that behaviour. Voat's solution to that was to archive old threads and posts. It addressed some data issues and also prevented brigades on old content (two birds with one stone). There are different ways to address the problem. But I'd rather remove the downvote feature altogether than live with a repurposed version of "downvotes".
(post is archived)