Linux is shit, OSX and iOS are trash, windows is the only OS that actually works, open source is always inferior to closed source, if you use VPN or encryption youre a criminal, java is slow, vim worse than nano, ..

Now that I've got your attention and you probably raged and downvoted.

Downvotes don't actually work on devrant. (not a bug)

This has been going on for months already - why have that function to begin with, if its just not fucking working? The usual answer to people throwing a fit is "just downvote it", WHY? it doesnt fucking work.

For a while specific options while downvoting DID actually work, but now any of the downvote options are just straight trashed and ignored, they are saved, dont get me wrong (or else it would be too obvious), but they dont affect any of the scores at all.

I understand mass bot downvoting should be prevented, but why take away anyones voice by completely ignoring downvotes. I really dont get it, its not "punishing" the creator of said post or comment, its simply reflecting what the users actually think of said comment or post, it boils my blood how thats even a thing, I am honestly disappointed.

Why should also downvoting something hide it from the feed (especially on the "recent" filter), let me fucking decide what I want on my feed via option then atleast. What if I don't agree with a rant, downvote it, but then want to see what others thought of it? how am I supposed to find it again?

@dfox @trogus now that I have vented, can you address that? I am sure others agree that downvoting should reflect in the score and not be just some sort of placebo button doing :active effects.

@JoshBent yep! I can confirm that! 😂

@elonmusk I was just about to throw my chair at you, good that you edited it lol

Interesting angel. 🤔 I'm cool with what current -- brought to me but I can get on board with Reddit style as well. Wanna here the thoughts of others.

1.-
@CurseMeSlowly
>Reddit/SO Style
So what will make the appeal of this site if it becomes a Reddit 2.0 place, may as well go the the actual place if you want such thing.

2.-
I wonder if If someone here downvoted a comment in a rant that some people seemed to agreed on here but It did jackshit lately and that was one of the many tipping points to make this rant...

* "This message was brought to you by a claimed person here mostly to troll and get a jerk off of people giving him attention for it." Or so His critics says*

Now to be on point with the bait Opening

>OSX and iOS are trash
Uberpriced and an Monopolistic Orwellian mess? Yeah but not literal trash imo, still wont use it

>Windows is the only OS that actually works
This past 2 weeks was a hard painful reminder that if it wasnt for some stuff that just cant be WINEd be it it just wont run or so unbelieve laggy that you want to cut your wrist, I would have gone full Linux already...

>Open source is always inferior to closed source.
That is kind of true though, alot of really good now Open Source programs where actually Commercial/Closed Source ones at first or had alot of money from backing by some company/organization when It was being developed and even today while good itself is not as good as the commercial/Close Source stuff (Krita comes to mind)

>If you use VPN or encryption youre a criminal
In many countries you are by literally just using it...

>Java is slow
Its a horrible resources hog in itself so You need the power to handle it

@legionfrontier well using downvote like Reddit alone wouldn't make this into Reddit 2.0, I hope.

I think I pretty much disagree with every point you wrote, and some are just flat out wrong.

1. Downvotes certainly do work. They serve multiple purposes as we’ve said many times before. “Not for me” is explicitly you telling the algorithm that you don’t like that type of content and don’t want to see it anymore. “Repost” is you telling the algorithm that you think it’s a repost and hence we hide it from people who don’t want to see reposts. And lastly, “offensive/spam” deducts from the user’s score and the score of the rant because it conveys inappropriate content.

Even “not for me” greatly impacts the visibility of rants to other users (because the algorithm uses similar users’ tastes to decide what to show you).

2. Downvoting is not meant for disagreements. That’s the most cancerous part of Reddit IMO (“I disagree with what you said, so here’s a downvote and a negative score”) and serves absolutely no purpose in terms of filtering good content. Why should something have a negative score because someone disagrees with it? That’s what good arguments are for. If you think someone is saying something stupid, downvoting it and trying to give them a negative score is the easy way out and while sometimes might be warranted, more often that not would just lead to downvoting because of simple disagreements. Unlike Reddit, our system accounts for that.

3. We hide rants you downvoted on the feed (and we always have) because we think downvoting should always suggest you don’t want to see that kind of content. It shouldn’t mean “I want to give the user a negative score but I’m also kind of interested in seeing where the rant goes.” See the conflict there? Downvoting based on opinion while admitting the rant has value to the community, and yourself if your still interested in seeing it. Not what we want downvotes to be used for. And if you really need to see it again, you can just look at your viewed items.

So yeah, as someone who has used Reddit a lot in the past, I’ve yet to see a healthy example of allowing negative downvotes just because you disagree with someone. From my experience, it only leads to the suppression of certain ideas by the majority, and creates more hostility.

What I do think is we can make it clearer how downvoting works, as I don’t think it’s documented anywhere (definitely should be), but none of these items were ever a secret and I’ve written about them many times in the past pretty in-depth.

Oh and just to add, “for a while specific options did work” is absolutely not correct. This behavior hasn’t changed since we launched downvote reasons.

Also, one more note - if you downvote as spam/offensive and it doesn’t subtract, then it means your spam/offensive downvote banned. And that occurs either automatically or manually if you’ve ever used spam/offensive downvote inappropriately. The vote is sill counted for moderation, but doesn’t show in the score. You can also get downvote banned automatically if you followed certain patterns of downvoting as offensive/spam. These bans are eventually lifted and only impact ability to negate scores, which we are pretty strict about since they have been misused in the past.

@dfox One could say many of the same things about upvotes. I thought it was funny != I agree with the opinion != it has value to the community.

@dfox

I can see where most of your points do make sense, especially if I think of the given example thats reddit, but not having any option but upvote, does feel limiting too, as there is cases where somebody does something that might not actually fit the category "offensive/spam" directly.

Banning "offensive/spam" is not solving the problem either, as that would be the only option to use whenever that happens.

(cont.)

@dfox

Also not everything actually warrants a comment/argument, "I didn't like that humour because..", "I don't appreciate you doing those kind of comments because.." (not to mention, that that person will just ignore it, as theres nothing to lose, as it is with "precious" points reached with actual positive comments and rants), thats why theres multiple options to voice your opinion on other platforms - be it via downvote (the less aggressive way of signalling that something was simply insensitive/rude/inappropriate/..) or if its more elaborate, via comment. (which if you force to comment on each of those situations, might and will rather turn into a more toxic environment, caused by not being able to just "downvote and move on")

(cont.)

@dfox

It's a "downvote" but feels more like an abused report function. I see the positive of not allowing us to actually voice our opinion of comments and rants, because a lot of the devrant system is based solely on posting quantity instead of quality (e.g memes), rushed guaranteed upvote comments like "I hate wordpress" etc. just to gain as much upvotes as one can milk it - punishing said content, would add some sort of self control to some, so they would actually think atleast for two seconds next time doing that one "witty" comment (e.g. "use google"), insensitive/rude comment or the ever milked comments.

(cont.)

@dfox

I can also see how downvoting memes could ban them by the community and it'll get solved by the categories sometime actually be available, but theres also content that you simply personally don't agree with or find offensive/insensitive, for example specific humour thats popular amongst the younger devs on here, especially edgy teenagers I would say, that try to top the last comment all over again, since theres no limit to that. Afterall getting a negative score, does make you think twice on what went wrong and does indeed have a positive moderation outcome.

(cont.)

@dfox

I probably would be able to add some more ideas and point of views to this, but I think it would be more valuable to see what you think of that perspective of downvoting, especially because I don't think one can compare reddit with this community in basically anything.

Reading back, I might have been also pretty harsh with my venting in the initial post, but it really hit near (from old thankfully dead communities that basically had a more extreme system in place), that this is essentially muting us all, just for the sanity of some and keeping mentioned main attraction (the "points" system) of the website, that makes many people migrate from other social media and strive in similar (questionable) methods to gain said points and protecting them by no -actual- existing downvote function for such.

(fin.)

@legionfrontier

I am glad that you embrace your title, though the one rant you I believe mean with your second point, wasn't adding to this rant, though it could count towards those disruptive comments mentioned above.

@JoshBent I think you have some valid points, but for me it mainly comes down to this:

One of the top goals for us is allowing good discussion and varying viewpoints. We’re very open to ideas, but IMO ideas that don’t address the concerns of allowing different opinions to now get downvoted aren’t really ones we can consider.

Again, from experience, I have never seen basic downvotes that can be given out for anything not lead to censoring. On one subreddit, a very large one, you can observe the following: they have a clear message that says something along the lines of “please do not downvote content you disagree with. Only downvote rule-violating/crappy content.”

And guess what? That subreddit happens to be one of the most cancerous and literally only one form of opinion is allowed and the rest are silenced with downvotes and the downvotes have 0 indication of the quality.

I also think it’s a fallacy that you can’t properly moderate content with just upvotes and selective downvotes. Why do you need a negating factor to promote good content? It accomplishes the same thing I think - while creating more room for abusive behavior and silencing.

Example: I like PHP. Should I be able to receive a negative score on a rant where I talk about how much I like PHP because people disagree with me? And I’m asking this honestly. Because going the route you suggest, I see literally no way to stop that from happening. If the “majority” dislikes PHP, then my rant will have a negative score...

So to circle back, we’re open to change, but not without addressing scenarios like that.

Just to add - I get the point that you want to be able to give some type of negative feedback. But I feel that not being able to do that is what makes devRant a friendly place.

You don’t like a piece of content? Then don’t engage with it. Someone doesn’t like that I made a rant speaking positively about PHP? Then they can make their own rant about why they don’t like PHP.

I don’t think everyone inherently deserves to give people negative feedback on their rants, and I think allowing that en-mass would make devRant kind of suck.

@dfox The more I think about it: a blocking/ignore function would basically solve most or basically all of the listed issues, while still maintaining all other functions in place, since it can't be abused to e.g. demoralize by mass downvoting

@JoshBent definitely - blocking/ignore is a feature I almost have complete but have hit some technical hurdles/scaling challenges so put it on the back burner for a little bit. It’s a little difficult with how our data is fetched to cover all the cases and make sure you don’t see/interact people you blocked. But it’s almost there and will definitely be a feature sometime after the new website launches!

@dfox oh, well, problem solved then, thanks! 😄

@dfox what just came to mind, maybe you and @trogus could do a medium article on how devrant is actually built, what kind of challenges you went through and stuff like that.

I am sure that would be a great read for anybody on devrant, it could be also split into many posts, covering multiple aspects, without the need to push out one big one.

Kind of like trello did for example

@JoshBent it’s a cool idea - will see if we can find some time for it.