Update to Downvote mechanics

Hi community!

We really appreciate the discussions that help make our forums healthier and more useful! Recently there’s been chatting about downvoting, and our team took some time to look into viable solutions from our side. We came up with a lot of long-tail items we’d like to address, but we wanted to make some tweaks in the near-term to address the pain points we’ve been hearing about.

First we’ve decreased the reputation punishment associated with a downvoted post. A downvote now removes 2 rep points instead of 6. ''I know downvotes can seem threatening and disheartening, but keep in mind that the vote is associated with the text “this didn’t help me” which we think is still a valid option to give people. In the future having reasons associated with votes would be ideal, but we’re not able to implement that any time soon.

Second we’ve decreased the number of daily downvotes allowed to a single user. A user can only make 5 downvotes in a day instead of 15. As Mods use the site on a more frequent basis, and have been proven and vetted, they are able to distribute downvotes as needed beyond that quota. We know you’ll be responsible ;)

We haven’t seen that downvote abuse is restricted to a specific account age or reputation range, and we’d like to enfranchise as many voters as we can to keep our community open and able to express themselves. As such the imposed limits affect the impact of downvotes themselves, they do not limit user access to the system. We believe this is the best way to correct downvote abuse as quickly and fairly as we can. Ideally the system will keep improving. In the meantime, if specific users continue to abuse the system, let’s deal with them individually, either with temporary bans or punitory rep removal, before we limit the ability of the community at large to vote.

Let us know if we did a good job! (If we didn’t do a good job, maybe wait til I’m out of the office) Of course I kid. Let the discussion begin! And happy (imminent) weekend!