They also obfuscate the real upvote/downvote numbers, purportedly to stop vote manipulation but I don't really see how it does anything but provide a mask of plausible deniability for editing the up/down figures for advertisements, subversive posts, etc.
That, and the inability to change a vote. There are many times I've hit the down arrow when I meant to hit the up arrow. After just one downvote, the comment starts to turn grey, which leads to more downvotes.
The numbers are fuzzed by generally a good indicator.
There's no way to disable downvoting on reddit. Some subs try to hide the button using custom CSS, but this doesn't affect those with custom CSS disabled sitewide, per-subreddit (with RES) or mobile users (presumably the majority of traffic).
Tangent rant: giving your sub some character with a custom banner is ok, but the ability to hide or change basic UI like the logout button or voting buttons is a huge flaw in the design of reddit.
Worth pointing out that Reddit up/downvotes have been heavily monitored for as long as Reddit fought voting rings. At least ten years. Any "suspicious" account has its voting rights neutered: The arrows become placebo buttons. I've observed this with every Reddit account I've owned (another certain website does this).
> They didn't have up/down, but a system of "Interesting", "Informative", "Off-Topic" and a few others. These are the same as up/down votes in the end, but make you classify postings.
I might be misremembering things, but I seem to recall that it was also possible to assign boost points to these in your user settings - i.e. so that Interesting posts would be treated as +2 rather than +1, for example.
When I first crossed 500 I noticed I could downvote replies but not top-level comments. Not sure when it happened, but now I can downvote top-levels too.
I wish I could turn off the downvote arrow. I never use it, and I have to be careful not to click it by mistake when upvoting.
Yep, that about sums up my experience with the app too.
You could also remove any post automatically once it hit -5 points, so me and some friends got together and downvoted every new yak off the platform. People were big mad.
Just my opinion of course, but I think you're already on the right track. With something like HN where there may be buttons that only make sense for 2 users and there is basically nothing a "normal" person could ever do to make them enabled, hiding them is the appropriate thing to do. A less clear HN example is the down arrow. When I first came on I didn't realize anybody could downvote and was super confused when I would see people complaining about downvotes. It led me to believe that there must be a ton of moderators out there doing controversial things. Would have been totally cleared up with a disabled down button with a hover text saying, "You need 500 karma points to down vote."
The example of a user who isn't logged in however, I think that case is mostly fine to hide things, so long as it's clear that you can log in. It's quite intuitive to have things be read only or dashboard mode without authenticating.
But of course some of these rules go out the window depending on the audience.
So long story short, I agree with you completely, there's a lot of nuance.
What I meant was that the numbered score they had next to every post was 0, which is incredibly atypical for that to show up on the front page.
And yes, Reddit removed the ability to see the number of upvotes/downvotes on any item a few years back. Just another way for them to obfuscate the actual results of a post.
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