You claim that you've learned your lessons from Discussions (or maybe you just want the visibility), yet proceeded to remove/ignore (potato/potahto) downvotes (or thumbs-down) from these posts.

This has been a point of disagreement between community and the company forever and ever. And your only solution (to a problem that its existence is up for debate to begin with) is to remove downvotes; you've tried it multiple times, why not consider one of the other (maybe not perfect, but different) options laid out in the posts that have discussed downvotes (both here and on MSE)?!

You seem to prioritize reducing visible friction (thinking that encourages new users and product adoption) over refining the system that the established community values for quality control (which ends up being one of the reasons those products/experiments fail).

Updates to address Hoid's response in the comments:

First, let me say that I appreciate the discussion. I subscribe to this Cody's quote (fact) that Progress cannot happen without confrontation.

We are not saying the downvote has no value, just that we want to take this experiment as an opportunity to rethink that approach. Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece of content, but its less so for the author of a piece of content because it doesn't signal the actual problem and what might be causing it.

I understand that this is an important topic for you and you'd want to use every opportunity to revisit it. But I don't see any rethinking here. Just doing the same thing. I have previously suggested capping the score at -1 or 0 for the original author. I am not saying that's the best method, just something that I remember cause I suggested it (there are probably better suggestions across the network).

I don't see any value in testing something (with minor adjustments or not) that has been tried multiple times and has been proven to not work again and again.

When you not show the score, you are ignoring that "Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece".

However, at this stage of experimentation, we are simply testing overall interest in this content type and potential spam exposure, before investing in answering that particular question.

I have already talked about these kinds of experiments/implementations and also pointed out what could've been done to save Discussions. I'd be happy to be proven wrong as I don't want to see any efforts go to waste, but I think this approach of we'll do barely the bare-minimum and we'd circle back later is just akin to setting yourself up for failure.

You claim that you've learned your lessons from Discussions (or maybe you just want the visibility), yet proceeded to remove/ignore (potato/potahto) downvotes (or thumbs-down) from these posts.

This has been a point of disagreement between community and the company forever and ever. And your only solution (to a problem that its existence is up for debate to begin with) is to remove downvotes; you've tried it multiple times, why not consider one of the other (maybe not perfect, but different) options laid out in the posts that have discussed downvotes (both here and on MSE)?!

You seem to prioritize reducing visible friction (thinking that encourages new users and product adoption) over refining the system that the established community values for quality control (which ends up being one of the reasons those products/experiments fail).

Updates to address Hoid's response in the comments:

First, let me say that I appreciate the discussion. I subscribe to this Cody's quote (fact) that Progress cannot happen without confrontation.

We are not saying the downvote has no value, just that we want to take this experiment as an opportunity to rethink that approach. Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece of content, but its less so for the author of a piece of content because it doesn't signal the actual problem and what might be causing it.

I understand that this is an important topic for you and you'd want to use every opportunity to revisit it. But I don't see any rethinking here. Just doing the same thing. I have previously suggested capping the score at -1 or 0 for the original author. I am not saying that's the best method, just something that I remember cause I suggested it (there are probably better suggestions across the network).

I don't see any value in testing something (with minor adjustments or not) that has been tried multiple times and has been proven to not work again and again.

When you do not show the score, you are ignoring that "Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece".

However, at this stage of experimentation, we are simply testing overall interest in this content type and potential spam exposure, before investing in answering that particular question.

I have already talked about these kinds of experiments/implementations and also pointed out what could've been done to save Discussions. I'd be happy to be proven wrong as I don't want to see any efforts go to waste, but I think this approach of we'll do barely the bare-minimum and we'd circle back later is just akin to setting yourself up for failure.

You claim that you've learned your lessons from Discussions (or maybe I am wrong, you just want the more visibility lesson), yet proceeded to remove/ignore (potato/potahto) downvotes (or thumbs-down) from these posts.

This has been a point of disagreement between community and the company forever and ever. And your only solution (to a problem that its existence is up for debate to begin with) is to remove downvotes; you've tried it multiple times, why not consider one of the other (maybe not perfect, but different) options laid out in the posts that have discussed downvotes (both here and on MSE)?!

You seem to prioritize reducing visible friction (thinking that encourages new users and product adoption) over refining the system that the established community values for quality control (which ends up being one of the reasons those products/experiments fail).

You claim that you've learned your lessons from Discussions (or maybe you just want the visibility), yet proceeded to remove/ignore (potato/potahto) downvotes (or thumbs-down) from these posts.

This has been a point of disagreement between community and the company forever and ever. And your only solution (to a problem that its existence is up for debate to begin with) is to remove downvotes; you've tried it multiple times, why not consider one of the other (maybe not perfect, but different) options laid out in the posts that have discussed downvotes (both here and on MSE)?!

You seem to prioritize reducing visible friction (thinking that encourages new users and product adoption) over refining the system that the established community values for quality control (which ends up being one of the reasons those products/experiments fail).

Updates to address Hoid's response in the comments:

First, let me say that I appreciate the discussion. I subscribe to this Cody's quote (fact) that Progress cannot happen without confrontation.

We are not saying the downvote has no value, just that we want to take this experiment as an opportunity to rethink that approach. Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece of content, but its less so for the author of a piece of content because it doesn't signal the actual problem and what might be causing it.

I understand that this is an important topic for you and you'd want to use every opportunity to revisit it. But I don't see any rethinking here. Just doing the same thing. I have previously suggested capping the score at -1 or 0 for the original author. I am not saying that's the best method, just something that I remember cause I suggested it (there are probably better suggestions across the network).

I don't see any value in testing something (with minor adjustments or not) that has been tried multiple times and has been proven to not work again and again.

When you not show the score, you are ignoring that "Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece".

However, at this stage of experimentation, we are simply testing overall interest in this content type and potential spam exposure, before investing in answering that particular question.

I have already talked about these kinds of experiments/implementations and also pointed out what could've been done to save Discussions. I'd be happy to be proven wrong as I don't want to see any efforts go to waste, but I think this approach of we'll do barely the bare-minimum and we'd circle back later is just akin to setting yourself up for failure.