You’re obviously allowed to care and to express that. I hope you don’t hear me saying that I think you’re dumb or anything like that. In fact it’s pretty much the exact opposite. Most of the time when I see people complain about downvotes they’re trolls upset that it hampers their ability to be a troll but you seem like a reasonable person so I am simply seeking to better understand your perspective.

To put it another way I agree with your first sentence but I don’t generally feel like visible downvotes prevents that from happening. I actually think downvotes function to encourage good discussion more often than not. That isn’t true in all cases but it seems easier to be discouraged or get the wrong idea about prevailing sentiments if the dumb comments are just sitting there next to the good comments with no indication that a majority of other users also think they’re dumb.

I mean it was mostly a joke but it’s also semi serious. You seem capable of disagreement without it bothering you much so I don’t get why the number next to a comment is different. Yeah some people use it in a dumb way but that’s true of pretty much everything.

I disagree. Have I ruined your mood now or do I have to actually downvote you for it to work?

I don’t have a strong opinion on whether or not downvotes should be used to signal disagreement but I don’t think there’s much point in debating that because that’s how they are used. It seems like the only options are coming to terms with that or not using sites that have the option to downvote. I really don’t think it’s that big of a deal though. If someone doesn’t know how to disagree with others without it ruining their day then they need to learn that skill anyway.

There’s legitimate uses for downvotes but you seem to take issue with people using it to express disagreement. My question is why does that bother you? There’s lots of reasons why that could happen, some valid and some not. Disagreement isn’t usually supposed to signal that you’re a piece of shit or however else you seem to be interpreting it. It just means the people who read your comment don’t share your view but you don’t even know who they are so who cares. It’s a minor thing. It’s equivalent to telling a joke to your friends and no one laughs. Big fucking deal, life goes on.

That’s beautiful

You make mostly good points but its stupid to call the game dead or dying. They don’t currently have a bunch of players they never expected to have in the first place. They still sold their product to those people which makes it a huge net win for them. It’s a wildly successful game by any reasonable metric you can choose to evaluate it against.

That’s not the take you should come away from this story with. None of them should be allowed to do it.

Honest question, what’s there to be hyped about? I haven’t ever looked into its feature set because it looks like ass. Do people just like the Tesla name or what?

What’s there to learn that isn’t already widely known? Existing (copyright) laws are asinine and all corporations eventually become consumed by greed. That’s America in a nutshell.

Nothing for people who know what DNS is. They’re targeting the people who don’t.

People do hate change. The bigger the change the more they hate it. That’s exactly why Windows to Linux is much worse for them than Windows 10 to Windows 11.

Your grandma probably hates the fact that you did though. There’s a small chance that’s not the case but I’d be shocked if she hadn’t complained about it many times to other people.

You can say there’s no issues with that system as many times as you like but it’s not going to make it true. Some people definitely disagree with you on that point and I know that because I’m one of them. You don’t seem all that interested in having that opinion challenged so I’m not going to bother writing out why here but I’ve said more on the topic in this thread if you’d like to understand another perspective more clearly.

Just because they’re already doing it doesn’t mean there’s no issues with it.

It does talk about some steps they’re taking right at the beginning. I missed those initially because on mobile it looks like an ad before the actual article starts so I skimmed over it.

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Sure, but who decides who the assholes are? What standard of proof do they use? What happens to people who almost meet that definition but don’t quite? Some cases are pretty straightforward but many have too much grey area for a simple concept like ‘ban all the assholes’ to hold up without a huge amount of effort that often can’t be provided effectively.

Evidence is key and that can be difficult to get. Additionally, players often edit clips to get the reaction they want from moderators or the community as a whole. The video in the linked article could potentially be a great example of this. The streamer obviously wants you to think they were attacked unprovoked but is that really what happened? We have no context for what led to the recorded exchange. Did the streamer refer to him using a racial slur for failing to hold what they thought was the proper position during the round immediately before the video begins? That doesn’t excuse what the player said in response but it does change the context significantly. If you ban the rape guy and then he releases a video showing the streamer saying even more outrageous things do you reverse the ban, ban them both, or give them both a warning not to be dicks in the future? This is not an isolated incident either. Multiple situations just like this happen every day on platforms with any significant number of users. How do you give each one the time it requires to be resolved correctly? Will you have any players left if you ban everyone who offends someone else?

The point is, policing people’s behavior is very challenging. There are tons of ways to abuse any system you can design unless you record literally everything your users do and that comes with it’s own set of moral and logistical issues. The simplest and most universally applicable solution is to enable users to block other players themselves. Making that impact matchmaking is kind of dumb in my opinion as it just opens up the potential for abuse as you noted. Set up a few very simple ground rules and then let players sort out who they want to be able to communicate with based on how they treat them. That’s the only solution I can see that is realistic and sustainable but it requires users to take an active role in maintaining the community, which they should be doing anyway if they want it to be the kind of place you’re describing.

For most people gaming is a social activity. The popularity and prevalence of multiplayer games vs single player games bears this out. Playing single player games is not a viable solution to avoiding harassment for people who are interested in the social and/or multiplayer aspects of gaming. Muting people who are dicks is a viable solution and that’s exactly what I’ve been advocating for in this discussion. Many others seem to think they shouldn’t need to be involved in the process and game devs or other communication platforms should do all the work for them. I don’t think that’s a realistic suggestion.

I understand the comparison but you can’t exactly mute people with minimal effort in real life. Additionally, the threat of rape in person is significantly different than anonymously online from a legal perspective because the person making the threat knows who and where the target is at the moment the threat is made.

At a high level I don’t disagree with most of what you’re saying. The point I’m making is that there’s a pretty large gap between “something should be done about online harassment” and “this is our plan for stopping online harassment”. Most calls for action appeal to the first without much concern for the second, and the solution is the difficult part, not identifying the problem.