[2019] The downvote button is gone

Yes, the downvote button has been removed. We've received a number of complaints about it in the past, it doesn't actually impact Karma, nor how posts are surfaced to anyone so this felt like a pretty safe feature to disable for now.

These reactions are utilized to assist you when you just need to provide a simple emoji versus a full response. In most cases we've found many of you do both which largely defeats their purpose. There is still some value in keeping the others as many of you clearly make use of it.

Let us know how well the Confused works for you.

Hey there!

In terms of forum changes here are some examples of major changes we made the forums and announced:

Forum Guideline Revamp

Volunteer Moderator Program

This was a fairly minor change which took less than a minute. To reiterate my original statement, we can see which of you individually used reactions on our side and many of you both vote and provide a response. We also believe "many will probably take to actually writing the opinions, right, wrong, toxic, etc." as a really good thing. The more opinions provided, the more feedback we can gather, and greater community cohesion through discussion.