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[–] DjangoRed 6 points 59 points (+65|-6) ago 

Downvotes should be used for spam or shitty effort. It's disingenuous to say that the community's wisdom shines through the dispensing of upvotes and downvotes. Downvotes are the lazy fucks way of expressing disagreement and are almost always used as such, moreso as voat has grown.

The reddit hivemind is just plain wrong about so many things. I had to write literal five paragraph essays if I went against the reddit hivemind and I wanted to have the "community" on my side. Fuck that. As voat grows, the same thing will happen.

I shouldn't have to continuously apologize for possibly offending people, so people don't shutdown when reading my comment and going into autodownvote mode. I shouldn't have to explicitly state if I'm playing devil's advocate or if something is not my personal views.

I stopped commenting on the majority of reddit because the noise was so bad. If I did feel so compelled to leave a comment, I stuck to a stream of thought style of commenting. I just wrote whatever came to mind and posted. No proofreads. No rewrites. Any more effort was not worth the time spent.

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[–] Nerded ago  (edited ago)

I agree. Especially because of this websites infancy, up and down votes mean a lot to Voaters. If people are putting in thoughtful content and you like it, upvote them. Or if you don't? Ignore it. Downvotes should be saved purely for half assed content and for plain ignorance.

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[–] Boltbeam ago  (edited ago)

Downvotes should be used for spam or shitty effort. It's disingenuous to say that the community's wisdom shines through the dispensing of upvotes and downvotes. Downvotes are the lazy fucks way of expressing disagreement and are almost always used as such, moreso as voat has grown.

This. Don't know about you guys, but I don't want to be delayed in my ability to downvote because someone got butthurt and downvoted quite a few comments of mine.

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[–] PM_ME_YOUR_PLOT_HOLE 1 point 1 point (+2|-1) ago 

I downvoat people convinced that the raliens live amongst us. I don't need to explain why I do that.

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[–] Reow 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

I completely agree with you, but the problem is how to enforce this. Even if it should be part of the community spirit, there will always be those who misuse downvotes, and it would be nearly impossible to prove they downvoted because they disagreed instead of because they thought the comment had no value.

If downvotes are simply supposed to be about enforcing the rules of the sub, I think we should do away with them and replace them with a Report button instead. Alternatively, if we simply want people to think before downvoting, then perhaps whenever a person downvotes, they should lose a point of karma (or whatever we're calling it) as well (StackExchange does something similar to this). Honestly, though, I don't know if there is a good solution.

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[–] weeeasles 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Limiting the ability to down vote sounds like a good idea to me, so long as we stop have a system in place to prevent mass spam from exploiting said measures.

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