Topic: Down Votes

Silverwolf064 said:
free speech is very hated by salty people who cant leave things alone.

"Free speech" refers to your right to state or publish your opinion without fear of governmental censorship. It doesn't mean e6 can't censor your opinion, it doesn't mean you're entitled to whatever you like, and it especially does not mean people have to agree with or even tolerate your words. On e6, and pornography in general, role-playing or other comments to the extent of "i like this," are generally frowned upon as nonconstructive, spammy, and sometimes a little creepy. Stuff like "OwO Me next!" is relatively harmless and all in good fun, but "Fuck so hot i wish that were me" or "Oh baby, she can Twilight my Sparkle any day ;;)" can often disrupt a person's "flow" with the reminder that someone else is ALSO masturbating to the same image, and that that person doesn't have an especially strong filter. Granted, users have quite a tendency to down-vote anything they don't agree with, and commenting on photos only to say that you didn't like the gender-pairing or the kink can be taken by some as either a personal attack on their preferences, or "ungratefulness" on the commenter's part. It can be a little bizarre sometimes, and I mourn the loss of all the taboo fetish images downvoted to oblivion because people don't know how to blacklist, but clicking "Show comments below threshold" isn't hard, and it does give a reasonable method of avoiding comments that might be distasteful or unpleasant.

I guess the short answer is that we're not Youtube. A downvote means "I don't wanna see this", or "This isn't great", and adjusts a comment's score in a linear fashion, much more like Reddit or Digg. Compared to Youtube's black-box algorithms, where loads of math are done to figure out exactly what ordering of spammy and juvenile comments will keep people watching, I'm not especially displeased about this.

Updated by anonymous