A much bigger problem in my opinion is that a post only needs 2 up votes — one is automatically there from creating the post — to reach the front page, and the ability for anyone to signup with unlimited accounts. Its far, far too easy for the front page to be filled with low quality content that has clearly been put there by a few strategically created accounts.

Personally in the last few weeks I've been making a more concerted effort to upvote things I want to see — usually discussions — and downvoting anything that looks like spam or I don't think belongs here or is a dupe (we really don't need 4 posts covering a bloody software update or several covering a startup press release for example). I suspect I've contributed a little bit to this. I've also been very active in report spam posts and accounts lately as well, as clearly there is an issue there.

I've also noticed the sudden surge in downvoting too since I became more active in doing so myself. It does now seem all posts have 0 or negative votes minutes after they have been posted. Could the extra surge be Bots?

One interesting thing I have noticed in being more active. It seems very few other people are. One upvote or downvote from me seems to put something on the frontpage or dooms it to eternity in the recent tab.

This place will never get better it seems, even if we as users become more active and discerning in what we post.

There seems to be a handful of ways DN can fix this stuff.

• I think a lot of the problems will resolve themselves if we go back to more restrictive signup process. Having a few hoops to jump through kept the quality of the community high as it couldn't be rigged by marketers. That lead to more appropriate content and better discussions. Hell, as someone in Australia, I had to either make a concerted effort to get up at 4am to be able to create an account or do so from a better timezone, which I did when in South America.
• Posting guidelines - I personally think this place has basically become a self promotion tool (fine in limited amounts) and just a dumping ground for press releases. DN already removes Listicles and it works somewhat to keep that at bay. Some kind of guidelines that help encourage questions, sharing of work rather than just articles to browse would be great. It would also give a nice guide for other DN users on what content that should be left, upvoted, downvoted or removed.
• Everybody starts using the upvote aod downvote buttons more. It seems people only use the upvote occasionally and the downvote not at all. I agree that downvoting shouldn't be for disagreeing with an idea or sentiment, but should be used on stuff that shouldn't be here.
• A few more moderators. Perhaps in different timezones. I'm in Australia, and when view DN this place is a bit of a ghost town, and just fills with spam as (I'm assuming) the mods are US and Europe based.

Hey all!

Thanks for the feedback. I can assure you it’s not falling on deaf ears. This thread is important, and I wanted to give some context as to why we made the decision to go with downvotes. As you’re all well aware -- we were having some serious spam issues last year (especially Oct/Nov). The solution that we came to (after asking the community for their input) was to implement downvoting so that the best content would be the most visible. Downvoting obviously isn’t set in stone, but it the most requested option at the time, so we went with it. Also, we delayed comments for new users for five days in order to make sure these were people that were actually interested in being a part of the community.

I’m sorry that some here feel the community is going in the wrong direction, or that we’re doing a poor job. We’re doing the best we can. To be honest, it’s been difficult to find the right balance here, as some of the direct messages to us have been nasty and unproductive. For those who reached out with productive feedback that we missed, I’m sorry. That’s on us. We’ve brought on more moderators to catch lousy content and remove it. Yes, sometimes we miss them, but we’re active here regularly throughout the day, every day. I personally remove around 4-5 stories a day that are flagged.

That all being said -- let’s talk about ways we can improve. We want to hear them!

I've been raising the issue with the mods for two months now. Everybody's aware by now that downvoting was a wrong decision, in hindsight. It only helped voting rings by giving them the ability to sink good content while reducing the number of upvotes they needed to reach the frontpage.

Well, based on other comments around the site, it seems some people are totally OK with spam and blatant self-promotion. Have at it then, and good luck to DN moving forward. I truly do hope it can become better.

Hi Guys, I might have a solution for the whole downvote thing: Just show on every user Profile how many Up or Downvotes everyone did. Then let's see how the whole thing will regulate by itself. In a secure environment (act anonymously), crude behaviors of mankind gets room to grow, unfortunately.

ps. sorry for my bad english.

Yes it is strange. I'd sent the DN team an email about it earlier today but I didn't realise it had been happening for the past week!

I downvote "activist" or clearly political posts so maybe there are other liberals here who do the same.

The lack of purely design related posts lead to people being BORED and they downvote for the lols, see the comments here, they are ALL negative voted :P

I feel like Designer news is dying, sadly. I think just remove the downvote. What it does basically is removing a vote from someone who likes the post. Is it helpful?

The introduction of downvotes was the single most stupid decision in the history of stupid decisions. Just wait and see how this comment gets downvoted.