Remove review downvotes

[brirush84]

Edit: As review flagging is a separate issue, this issue is about removing downvotes on reviews, a course of action only made possible when we've already added flags for low-quality reviews.

Right now, you can vote for reviews as helpful or unhelpful. The total number of people who voted is displayed, with the number of positive votes indicated (such as 0 out of 12).

Positive review upvotes are helpful, particularly for very popular games, which are likely to be the ones most viewed. For someone looking at Photopia or 9:05, it's helpful to see the highest-rated review.

Negative review upvotes are frequently abused. I have some self-interest here, as someone's been downvoting each of my reviews for about two months, but others have experienced this too (for instance, someone was downvoting all CYS reviews). Outside of such trolling, they mainly are used to express disapproval with troll reviews.

By removing negative downvotes, bad reviews will still sink to the bottom as they will receive few upvotes. By replacing it with review flagging (an flag that is only seen by moderators), troll reviews can be removed.

[dfabulich]

Review flagging is filed as https://github.com/iftechfoundation/ifdb/issues/869

Removing negative votes is an interesting idea

[brirush84]

Review flagging is filed as iftechfoundation/ifdb#869

Removing negative reviews is an interesting idea

I'm not used to github; does that mean I should remove or edit my issue to merge with the other?

[dfabulich]

The cultural mores around Github issues are subtle. If this were an exact duplicate of another issue, I'd have just closed this issue outright. But as filed, this bug is two issues: adding review flagging, and removing downvotes.

I think what I'd do is edit your description to say "We're gonna add review flagging, and when we do, we should get rid of downvotes as well"

[curiousdannii]

A low quality review is different from a problematic review that needs to be removed. I think there's value in being able to mark a review as unhelpful if, for example, all it says is that it hit the reviewer's personal tastes. I don't think negative review votes are bad on the whole.

Problematic review voting is a separate issue, and should be handled by the moderation team.

[brirush84]

A low quality review is different from a problematic review that needs to be removed. I think there's value in being able to mark a review as unhelpful if all it says is that it hit the reviewer's personal tastes. I don't think negative review votes are bad on the whole.

Problematic review voting is a separate issue, and should be handled by the moderation team.

That's good feedback, thank you!

[dfabulich]

IMO, a widely held social-software best practice is to avoid having a downvote system to express contradictory opinions and only use them to supplement an upvote system where there's a "right answer."

For example, StackOverflow has a downvote system, and it really shines when the "best" answer becomes obsolete, allowing the new answer to rise to the top. But for most SO questions, there is a genuine "best answer" that the system is actively trying to find.

By comparison, there's the ratings on the games themselves (or ratings on other review sites, like IMDB). The theory is when I give The Shawshank Redemption 10 out of 10, I'm not doing it in order to vote The Godfather down. I'm making a bunch of "independent" judgments. (Well, not really, but close enough.)

Note that if you adopt my advice from iftechfoundation/ifdb#863 and use a confidence interval, and where most ratings fall in the 6-10 range, ratings typically effectively turn into upvotes, where a perfect 10/10 is a full upvote, a 7/10 is half of an upvote, and 5/10 is no upvote at all. These systems tend to fall apart when folks rate things 0/10 in order to express their political disapproval of the art or its creators.

There may be a clever "meta" reason to have downvotes in a system, which is that they serve as a honeypot for folks who would abuse the system. If you see someone give 1-star reviews to a whole bunch of games belonging to a particular author, you might want to shadowban that reviewer!

[qdacsvx]

+1 I believe removing downvotes will create a positive atmosphere leading to more users writing reviews and more works being reviewed.

@brirush84 Please update the title of the issue e.g. "Remove downvotes for reviews".

[brirush84]

Noting that several people are again abusing the review downvoting system to mass downvote people's reviews regardless of content.

[Durafen]

Interesting discussion. The reviews are already sorted from most liked to less liked, so I don't think there is a need to keep the negative vote option. It's also interesting to see the impact of it on reviews in the future (social experiment wise :)