ADD Dislike button

[Lambdafish]

No, thanks. Experience from other forums indicate that such a feature very easily lends itself to abuse. Which is why the general trend is to not have dislike buttons.

Abuse in what way? If a point is disagreed on by a lot of people, surely adding a lot of dislikes is a better indicator than flooding the thread with negative comments. Why feed trolls and bump threads back to the top when you can just dislike them and move on.

[Risvertasashi]

Abuse in what way? If a point is disagreed on by a lot of people, surely adding a lot of dislikes is a better indicator than flooding the thread with negative comments. Why feed trolls and bump threads back to the top when you can just dislike them and move on.

Functionally it's also useless. You don't need a dislike button, you can simply see a complaint below it getting a lot of likes if people disagree.

But the honest answer: People dislike anything that disagrees with their (often narrow) worldview, not just "troll" threads. Even posting purely informational stuff gets disliked into oblivion if it's not what people want to hear.

[Theodric]

Abuse in what way? If a point is disagreed on by a lot of people, surely adding a lot of dislikes is a better indicator than flooding the thread with negative comments. Why feed trolls and bump threads back to the top when you can just dislike them and move on.

In theory, yes. In practice it just leads to popular opinion drowning out even the most constructive of posts. It happens fairly often over on the FF14 Reddit and, incidentally, a lot of people over there will say stuff purely for the sake of towing the line and 'baiting' likes because they want to feel part of the perceived crowd.

[Stitches1974]

In practice it just leads to popular opinion drowning out even the most constructive of posts. It happens fairly often over on the FF14 Reddit and, incidentally, a lot of people over there will say stuff purely for the sake of towing the line and 'baiting' likes because they want to feel part of the perceived crowd.

Happens a lot on the WoW forums. Someone asks a simple question trying to get help, bunch of dislikes. Yet, the forums trolls will post something and get a bunch of likes.

[Nixxe]

Happens a lot on the WoW forums. Someone asks a simple question trying to get help, bunch of dislikes. Yet, the forums trolls will post something and get a bunch of likes.

Yeah, and you can get a relatively small group of players who are inordinately upset about some issue and they'll run around spam downvoting everything they disagree with in order to make it look like it's super unpopular, even if the reality is more people are in favor of it, but just don't bother to upvote it.

[loreleidiangelo]

In theory, yes. In practice it just leads to popular opinion drowning out even the most constructive of posts. It happens fairly often over on the FF14 Reddit and, incidentally, a lot of people over there will say stuff purely for the sake of towing the line and 'baiting' likes because they want to feel part of the perceived crowd.

Pretty much, yeah. Even looking at my own comment history over there, anything that's seen as slightly deviant from the hive mind (not liking healer DPS, for one...) gets me downvoted like woah and my comments either hidden or pushed all the way down to the bottom where no one will read them. At least on these forums I can discuss with people and know that my views won't be punted to some comment dumpster just because my opinions are controversial.

I'm biased though; pretty much any PVP thread on the XIV reddit gets downvoted, even if it's honest questions. Meanwhile, mundane crap like "look at this hilariously bad person I met in DF!" is upvoted to the heavens and a huge circle-jerk over why THEY'RE not like all these "bad" players fills the thread.

Mind you, I'm indifferent to a dislike button overall, so long as it doesn't alter the viewing or organization of thread comments in any way. But on pretty much every other forum or comment medium it does, so if I had to choose, I'd say no, it's not necessary here.