I personally have mixed feelings. If someone comes on and says something ridiculous/rude/offensive, they deserve to be disliked, but some people were abusing downvotes so like I said there isn't a defined feeling about it for me. I have a feeling the removal was caused by TSW's forums since there's a lot more toxicity on there than there is here due to the larger amount of people using it. Let me know your thoughts about the removal too!
I did start a thread on this subject about a year ago suggesting the removal of the downvote option. It seems that it has now been implemented here.
I believe that in the interests of fairness, perhaps the upvote should be removed too... It's a one click populism mechanism that serves to remove the need for further debate. You like something? Explain yourself, this is a written forum. Same goes the other way around. The 'useful' upvote is perhaps the only one worth keeping as it serves an actual purpose, and isn't related to opinion or populism.
If someone is being deliberately obnoxious or annoying, you can always drop Dmitri or myself a PM and we'll take care of it. I also believe there's a Report function you can use. In our view, we received far too many complaints from having the option (forum wide) - and the vast majority of the time it was being used for other purposes than was intended and as a means to antagonise people. If interested, here's a link to the other thread. Best, Steve
Which I dislike to do but i’ve had to because previous experience it got so out of hand, they literally bullied people.