Here at Disqus, we strive to make it easy for readers to engage with content or communities in a variety of ways. Voting on comments can work to increase engagement with your fellow commenters without adding an actual comment, making it easy for readers to interact with content with just a click. Previously, we hid how many downvotes a comment received and only displayed the total upvotes, but we believe that liking and disliking something is a big part of how we engage with content and communicate with each other. Our goal is to create more spaces for people with different opinions to have more constructive interactions. For that reason, (and after receiving some great feedback from our awesome Disqus community!) we decided to bring back displaying downvotes. 

 

How it works: 

This feature will focus more on giving users more granular controls to rate comments. The numbers of up/down votes are displayed separately, not the total score. Commenters will need to be logged in to vote and will be allowed one vote per person. When sorting comments, the “sort by best” option will still sort by up/downvote net score. 

 

So, why do people downvote?

We know that people usually tend to downvote comments for a handful of reasons:

  • The comment does not contribute to the discussion
  • You disagree with the comment
  • You don’t like the user
  • You think the comment should appear lower in the discussion thread

Last year we created a poll to better understand why people downvote comments. We recognize that people may downvote a comment for a few different reasons, but we wanted to pinpoint the primary reason. You can access last year’s poll results here, but because our community is constantly growing and changing, we want to gather your feedback once more! ✔ Again, the options listed below are most likely not comprehensive nor totally representative of the different readers that participate in discussions every day on Disqus, but that’s why we need your help! 

Please participate in the poll below to share your feedback! (if you're not seeing the poll, you can answer it directly via this link):