Yeah actual feed back is usually better. But requiring that, rather than a simple downvote, means users are required to do emotional labour and work writing a reply, which can then be judged and criticised separately. Which doesn’t happen with a downvote. You don’t want a case where people are afraid to speak up publically against a comment, and hence it looks like everyone agrees
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Also, consider what’s worse to get, 20 downvotes, or 20 critical reply messages?
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Downvoting is essential functionality for a stack overflow style help site, and is necessary if discourse is to replace OSQA.
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I think we agree on the case for the Help side of the forums, and we are exploring that over here.
All my previous reflections were not talking about help, but the rest of the conversations.
Different people will prefer different things, but getting “disliked” without a way to understand why, I’m sure will discourage more people than being able to read a civil critique to you opinion.
If you disagree with someone, at least you need to take the effort to explain yourself. If you only need to do a click, I think we will enable an unhealthy dynamic.
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Let’s concentrate on achieving functional parity with the systems that Discourse is planning to replace first, then worry about the niceties. The old forums had no explicit “like” or “dislike”, so neither is needed for functional parity there.
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+1 … 
… yep, full acc from my side (but without 
)
I posted this reply via email, and on the web interface (which I use now) doesn’t allow one to emoji react to that message. One cannot 
it. Weird. That’s (IMO) a bug in discourse.
@nukeador could this be a solution for you for people who don’t want their messages voted on? For them to just use mailing list mode?
Update 2022-03-28: I was mistaken, it is possible to to this post
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AFAIK if you just reply +1 from email, discourse will automatically like that comment instead of posting +1.
I think people who want others to explain their disagreement instead of just send a dislike reaction don’t necessarily overlaps with people who want to use the email to interact.
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I can it though. I think what you’re seeing is just that you can’t react to your own posts.
That makes more sense.
However this was done via web, but the original was via email. No-one has reacted to that. Can someone try to react to it to check?
I’m not talking about that.
Yes I can (and just did) react to that.
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It is quite a long post but what is the status? We had a meeting with Dutch mappers and they would also like a thumps up emoticon as reaction instead of a heart. It is more neutral then a heart (it might be interpreted wrong).
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There’s been no further experimentation with this one, since the conversation end up more focused on the thumbs_down reaction.
There is plan to experiment enabling the thumbs_down reaction once there is more volume and communities in the forums, maybe thumbs_up can be also be tested at that time too, to understand if people prefers it.
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Regardless of what it looks like, “vote up” and “vote down” are key requirements for migrating the help site here.
Replacing the “heart” icon currently used for “vote up” with a “thumbs up” would also help prevent people getting the wrong idea about what “heart” might mean, but that’s secondary to providing the basic functionality needed for “help”.
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Being able to vote answers will be tackled as part of the Help OSM transition work:
I have noted that the “thumbs up” icon is now available in the short list of icons available to like or dislike any comment but if you click it it still converts into a “heart” shown below the comment.
So still remains to replace the “heart” icon below the comment with the “thumbs up” icon (if possible at all) as that is what many of us would like as far as I can see.
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will sufficeJust because you don’t like an idea does not mean you are angry 
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I know, but giving a thumb down without explaining why you disagree with an idea is pretty useless, so one would have to give a full explanation in a reply anyway.
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