I don't even use tone tags, I just feel like most people can infer I'm not being serious given the context of a situation, my most down voted post I made ages ago about the boy kisser kidnapping your brother was very clearly satirical in nature but the joke was poorly excicuted and got lots of downvotes, however I do not take them very seriously and I don't care too much when a joke gets down voted.

downvotes when used in this context can somewhat replace another removed feature we used to have, we used to have reactions for posts by the upvote and downvote area, where you could react with emojis not unlike how it's used on platforms like discord. someone might downvote a shitty joke because they can just react with " " and they just don't want to make a reply of just emojis.

I suppose at the end of the day our generation lives online more than in person so it's difficult to not view down votes as nothing more than a number but almost like a social credit score, and seeing a lot of negative numbers can feel like a personal attack or like everyone hates you but I promise you and whomever else is reading this the phrase "it's not that deep" applies here.

It has no positive contribution. They got rid of downvotes for a while due to downvoting attacks, and now that they're back they've made it be easier to carry out mass downvoting..?

@Blumenthal said:

You calling for people to explain themselves after every downvote and implying they're cowardly is the exact reason I downvoted

oh dang

uhhh wait yeah i did literally say that, i mostly just wanted a reason for why it was happening thank you

I probably shouldn't have implied that people are cowardly for downvoting things, its just frustrating when there's a huge pile of downvotes without a explanation (until now, thank you)

I don't think people should have to explain themselves after every downvote, but anonymous downvotes still make it harder to not ask for a explanation. It's okay for anyone to just say that they disagree with something even without an explanation, but the lack of any knowledge to see if they should be taken seriously and if i made like an actual mistake like I did here is really annoying when I make a ton of mistakes socially

One time I made a joke and got mass downvoted for it because I didn't include a "/j" at the end of it and people took it seriously, I had like a whole panic because I couldn't know if this one guy like super hated me for making that joke or if it was just people misinterpreting it. I only figured it out when they upvoted my joke that they didn't super hate me and it was just my mistake of not putting a tone tag there making people half-seriously downvote the post because they thought I said that BDNS was a christian forum with a straight face.

I think it's more of a me thing atp, but it still invokes a lot of panic in me personally

Like tbh it doesn't really bother me as much but i really miss the old voting system

I did downvote someone's post in this thread for example, I personally wont directly call them out or anything but idrc if they know I down voted them.

It also encourages trolling, like a really cowardly version of it, which is what's likely happening here tbh i'm probably just feeding whatever trolls but there shouldn't be a tool for people like that built into the website

It genuinely feels like only a tool for dishonest/cowardly people, this has to be straight up a worse change than removing downvotes entirely, it's just getting rid of any meaning to them except to hate

Also upvotes aren't anonymous so it lowkey doesn't even make sense