Want To Hide Your Downvotes?

Disqus is built for engagement and to enable community development for publishers and voting on comments is a simple way for readers to interact with content with just a click. Last October, we made the decision to display downvotes. We believe that either liking or disliking something is a large aspect of how we communicate with each other and engage with content, and we want to create spaces for people with different opinions to have more constructive interactions.

After receiving plenty of feedback from our valuable commenters and publishers, today we are releasing an update with the ability for all publishers to hide downvote details. Don’t worry, the button will still be there, and commenters will still be able to freely express themselves, but the downvote count and list of downvoters will no longer be displayed to commenters if a publisher chooses that option. Our goal is to provide publishers with flexible tools to engage their communities in a manner that feels the most appropriate for their members.

How do I make this change?:

If you’d like to hide the count and list of downvoters, you may do so by checking the “Hide the number of downvotes and downvoters from comments” box on your Community Settings page. This button allows you to hide both the number of downvotes and who downvoted, and this setting works retroactively as well, meaning all past discussions will now hide downvotes. We’ll also still record the downvotes, so for example if you choose to hide downvote details and then later decide that you want them back, the downvotes that were collected during that time will be shown.

Whether you choose to hide or display downvote details will not disable the ability for commenters to upvote or downvote a comment. If you sort your comments by “best,” it will still be based on upvotes/downvotes. This will not affect upvotes at all, and they will continue to be displayed regularly. Your settings will look like this:

If you have any questions, check out our help article here and let us know what you think in the comments below!