itch.io

In much of social media the idea of upvotes and downvotes (mostly downvotes on social medias platforms) have been very tossed around as a negative addition of late as , and at least the way I see it: justifiably so. But, that's not my main point so I'll move on to the other stuff.

The issue is that without actually having a loose understanding of why somebody agrees or disagrees with something, it quickly becomes impossible to know exactly why an opinion is 'bad' or 'good'. It is a lot more productive for people to give a very brief explanation of why they think its a great idea or a horrible idea, because the people judging a comment might actually be the troll (or similarly ill intended in their judgement of what may actually be a fair, thoughtful and caring critique), and there is no way to know that.

Plus, the best discussion is founded on disagreements-- but only disagreements which people openly share. Without knowledge of why people might disagree the original poster can't defend themselves and just feels shame or even sadness for putting care into an idea, while the people voting might have done so just because they did not like the fact that somebody thought the game they liked could be improved on.

What we ideally want is for people to feel comfortable sharing their ideas, and know that after they do they are going to be given opportunities to show off that idea instead of being shunned silently. Everybody wants to be heard, and by helping show them a better viewpoint or listening to their controversial but maybe actually well thought out viewpoint, everybody is made better by discussion rather than silent voting.

Additionally, as a side note of things I've seen, voting is hard to moderate as you don't know what individual you are meant to be reporting. I have seen some unfortunate voting where people asking if support for other languages would be added, and did so in a very polite tone, and got downvoted far more than any other comment.