Hi Marte,
Thanks for asking this question. I have been trying to answer this for quite some time but never got an opportunity.
There are a couple of important reasons that led us to remove "Downvote" button from the system:
- Hot ranking algorithm: In the beginning, Hot ranking algorithm was playing a crucial role in many places on Hashnode. This also included your personalised feed. Even though your Hashnode's feed is personalised, we used HRA to rank the posts in your feed. ATM, we are using a different algorithm to decide which posts you should see first, and HRA is no more valid.
- UX Issue: Since upvote button is very important for us, the presence of two buttons side-by-side was confusing the users. We proved this fact, with the help of analytics after removing downvote button. The number of upvotes to the posts have increased 4x after removing the downvote button.
What should I do, if I don't like a post? Not upvoting a post is a clear signal that the post isn't good enough for you. We track the number of times a post is visible to the number of interactions.
What if the post is offensive and I think it shouldn't belong to Hashnode? Please report the post. We manually check each post that is reported.