Downvote is changing

Ever notice how rare downvotes are on Minds? We did the math. And for every 1,000 upvotes cast by the Minds community, only 3 downvotes happen. So why have the button at all?

We recently surveyed the Minds community to find out how we all feel about downvoting. What does it mean when you downvote? And how come you don't do it more often? Generally, the 👎 is not very useful for most people because they don't want to put out public negativity. So we're making the button useful by changing how it works.

What's changing

We want to encourage more usage of downvoting, to give you new control over what posts appear in your feeds, and improve recommendations that power your For You feed. So starting today, downvote is changing. (At least, it's changing for 50% of you, while we test these improvements to understand the impact.)

1. We're being explicit: Downvote means "I don't want this in my feed."
   We're adding context to the downvote button to make it clear that downvoting is a tool for you to control your feed.
    
2. Downvoted posts won't come back.
   When you downvote something, it'll get removed from your feed and won't be shown to you again. Note that this is removing just the post you downvoted, and is not changing your subscriptions or otherwise altering your Latest newsfeed.
    
3. Downvotes are now quiet.
   To encourage more use of the downvote button, we're making downvotes "quiet." This means that downvotes no longer generate a notification for the person who's downvoted, and no longer are counted on posts. Your downvote is just for you, a tool to better control your feeds.

Why it matters for you

✅ Instantly zap posts from the feed that you don't want to see. The community has asked for a "hide post" feature so we've upgraded the downvote button to do this for you. And we've removed the notifications so you don't have to worry about sending the wrong signal to the original poster -- the downvote button is just for you.

✅ Your For You feed gets better with upvotes and downvotes. We see the For You feed as a vital tool for connecting Minds members with the rest of the community they haven't discovered yet, aligned along the interests that they have in common. The algorithm used for the For You feed gets better the more people upvote the things they like and downvote the things they don't.

❌ This DOES NOT mean that your Latest tab is getting algorithm'd. This change doesn't impact your Latest newsfeed, apart from hiding the individual posts you choose to hide. The Latest feed is always a chronological feed of posts from channels you subscribe to, no new algorithms.

❌ This is not about suppressing downvotes. Truth is, there are so few downvotes that there's nothing to suppress. We're getting rid of the notifications and hiding the counts because people said those features make them avoid using the downvote button. And if we're gonna have a button on every post on the site, it should be useful to more people.

We think this new paradigm for downvoting makes a button that almost no one used a powerful new tool that everyone can use to have better control your feeds.