Today, we removed the “down-vote” button and replaced it with a single “like” button. Why though?
The “down-vote” button or some might call it a “dislike” button, is part of Reddit’s popular ranking algorithm; which was later picked up by other platforms such as StumbleUpon, and Voten. It sounds good to be able to show your disagreement right? Not so fast:
As it turned out in the long term, not only “down-vote” button doesn’t help, it’s even destructive. Imagine spending 5 minutes of your precious time on writing a post, and then seeing it get down-voted a minute after. It’d piss you off, wouldn’t it? It probably would have been fine if you didn’t receive any interactions, or even a disagreement comment. At least a negative comment might give you a reason.
The only time the down-vote button is helpful is when the post is completely inappropriate, and it must not be shown to users at all. Wait a sec, isn’t that why the “report” button was implemented in the first place? You see where I’m going with this.
To prevent the confusion (when there’s “up-vote” button, it’s expected to be “down-vote” button too), we replaced the up-vote button with “like” button:
