Downvoting ideas

I would like that, but it’s not a pressing issue seeing that likes aren’t really considered in the decision making.

Hmm… maybe because the votes aren't the main decision factor (if at all...), at least it wouldn't cause “clicking wars” that do happen on some other platforms, while it could still be a way to indicate that we don't like some ideas.

(And yes, I’ve too seen some quite concerning suggestions and thought “oh I hope this isn't going to happen!” 🫣)

​@Jan_Mantau and ​@Jana_S are correct.  The problem isn't that we can't make a negative vote... the problem is the positive votes are meaningless, since only about 55 ideas in the past two years have been accepted.  In a previous thread I complained these votes were reminiscent of fake elections in dictatorships where the old dictator stands for reelection and gets 99% of the vote.  At least in recent months, the moderators have started to issue a canned statement in some of these threads that votes are only one of many different factors that go into their decision making process.  The primary one being a "roadmap" handed down from management.  If an idea doesn't align with that roadmap... forget it. 

I’m against allowing downvotes, or generally against anything that makes it easy for people to be negative. If we dislike an idea, we can either ignore it, or, as I suspect is the intent, explain why we believe it’s a bad idea. Drive-by downvoting without an explanation shouldn’t be encouraged. Upvoting generally doesn’t need an explanation, because you’re simply agreeing with what’s already been said.

Beyond that, some people can already feel discouraged by not receiving any upvotes on their post; receiving downvotes has a greater potential to drive them away for good. Downvoting has been used as a form of online bullying, which is one reason most social platform do not allow it (and if they do, they don’t show the downvote to anyone but the person who gave it, and use the downvote internally for post ranking). I’m sure they have lots of engagement data to show that public downvoting reduces the number of posts, because it scares people away from posting.

More practically, I could have downvoted this post and moved on without an explanation. Imagine, for argument’s sake, that lots of people did. Who gains from that? Would you have gained any understanding as to why people think it’s a bad idea? Downvoting doesn’t encourage conversation; in fact, it does the opposite.

Otherwise, yes, I agree that votes can feel pretty meaningless at times, but that’s another issue altogether.

Thanks folks, all very good arguments not to do it but just to clarify I was not thinking of downvotes in the discussion forums but just on ideas. Also the votes on ideas DO count, I give you dark mode as the classic example.

It helps if it fits in with what is on the roadmap as there is only limited time available, they also give the developers a steer into how we would like the product to behave. An example of that is that best efforts rewrite was coming up so they took ideas from here when they did it. There are other examples even if the votes aren’t the main factor, they are an important one to providing feedback.

​@VikK to be honest, the dark mode is rather an exception (and a marketing quick-win). If you look at other ideas with highest number of votes… running metrics from Apple Watch, localisation for Ukraine, not even an ETA nor official communication is available for those… and then there's the troubled “quick edit”, almost no votes, many users (me included) quite frankly hate it, but that particular idea somehow made it to the product. It's super frustrating from the user's perspective. 

​@Jana_S Don’t get me started on so called quick edit! What I’m hearing is that radio silence is not a great form of communication, maybe some sort of quarterly update for top ideas would be nice.

Even if it’s a no way like they said on dark mode for years, at least you know where the idea stands.

As ​@JBW-Florida said, he saw 55 implemented ideas in 2 years. That’s actually pretty good even if we hate half of those things...but maybe if you can downvote them before they are implemented 🤔

Absolutely! Ideally with a live Q&A session… 😏