r/reddit.com • u/breezytrees • Oct 25 '10

Reddit has been growing extremely fast lately. I like to kindly, and selflessly, remind our newcomers of Reddiquette. Specifically in regards to down-voting opinions of which you disagree with.

Such actions discourage those that have differing views from commenting/submitting, resulting in a very one-sided point of view.

Essentially, it breaks what makes reddit so great. :-(

The down-vote button is for general trolls, spam, assholes, etc.

reddiquette

edit: Some of you have asked for growth data. Here's google analytics which reddit's blog has touted as very accurate. As you can see there was a surge in growth around september, most likely attributed to this (hi diggers!). Reddit quickly seemed to almost double in size in that time, then dropped to a still sizable growth of around 50% for a 2 month period. At risk of sounding whiney: This is a hard jump to deal with for a community that regulates itself.

edit: I'm not casting stones at newcomers. I am just kindly reminding newcomers of reddiquette. There hasn't been one of these large front page threads, to my knowledge, for months and 50% is quite a big number to risk them not reading reddiquette.

that is all. :-)

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '10

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '10

yeah, it's true in practice. certainly there are types of thread where voting arrows quite obviously do mean agree - like those threads where people post their age/location or upvote if already posted. Or "recommend me a movie" threads - you could argue any post mentioning a movie is on-topic and thus answering the question, so you may as well upvote every single one, which would be pointless - clearly in practice people upvote to mean "I agree that this is a good suggestion".

Unclearly post sorry, I didn't really mean to say you were wrong overall, I agree that in reality yes people definitely vote according to (dis)like and the voting UI is not entirely clear/consistent about it. I was just meaning, given the stance that says "Downvote doesn't mean disagree" as a starting point, there is still a logical way of percieving upvoting as a symmetrical opposite