There's some cases where people deserve it but I've even seen in the past the most harmless of opinions receive downvotes and it's made me scratch my head wondering why, it's cause I feel it's basically a "I agree, "I disagree" system, so someone could say "I like Apples" and receive -5 downvotes by people who don't like apples and it just feels mean spirited, Lmao. And as I said, I think it hurts discussion too, instead of responding it's so much easier to just click the thumbs up or down button.

But people voted for it to remain so I'm not going to force that decision on the majority even if I disagree with it

Not like we have the manpower to implement a bunch of functional changes anyway, Lol.

This is something I've expressed negative feelings about before. I don't really care about upvotes on the forums, but the downvotes are just brutal. I find myself often thinking about how I should phrase myself to not get downvoted, possibly affecting my decision about which of my views to share as well. I try to be reasonable, even if others might disagree with my opinions, but people are quick to downvote. I guess the situation has improved since I last criticized the voting system, or it might just be that I've learned to play the system well enough to get downvoted relatively rarely. Anyway, this is probably useless rambling, because there seems to be little chance of anything getting done to the voting system, as mentioned by Ryuu.

Let's be clear. We don't actually care if you are a right wing conservative or a left wing progressive, if you are an ass, then you are GOING to get moderated either way... And so you should.
And yes, conservatives can be nice people and progressives can be toxic, it happens on both sides. Again, we don't care or look at whether someone is a conservative or a progressive when managing poor behavior. We just manage the behavior.

As for the voting system... It's more often a popularity contest where people will upvote their favorite posters rather than use it as a determiner of fact vs fiction... Whenever you introduce a human element to a system, these kinds of things tend to happen as we cannot detach emotion from our line of thinking.

1. VGCHART feels/looks like a site from 15 years. Total need of a site remodel.
2. I personally think we need to reduce the amount of forum sections on the site; Were just spread to thin. Just have gaming (PS, NINTENDO, XBOX) and tag the topic as one of those(Think Reddit), sales and off topic.
3. Lots of users that hang around the site but don't game. You can't really contribute too much.
4. Tone down anti trolling. Part of forum life. Get thicker skin. Especially parents. You didn't make make consoles, games or own the company.

Yeah, I think the entire site needs a remodel and especially a mobile version but we sure as shit ain't achieving that with a single volunteer, Lol.

Wouldn't be opposed to some more streamlining but I don't believe it's a popular suggestion, last time we decreased the amount of topics there was a bit of "I hope you don't go any further than this" from the community. I do think though, we should delete NSFW section and instead have a little tick box when creating a thread to label it as NSFW because I don't think it makes sense to have its own separate section when it can theoretically apply to every section.

If enough people complain then I would have done another vote but the issue is how little support we have so even if we wanted to add something new or change something, Bandorr is the only guy we have right now so he'd have to find time to go delve into code he likely hasn't touched before and figure it all out then make the changes so it's not exclusive to the vote system, we're just too short-staffed.

And mobile is basically a non-starter, we ain't got anybody with experience there AFAIK.

Have we though about just starting a brand new smaller forum? I would donate money to that idea. Having are own Resetera.

EDIT: What if we just moved to Reddit? Page just for VGChartz and continue what we there and site that continues to stay updated and current; Instead of a site just a brand.  The New crowd we would gather there would be revitalizing.

Is the objection to the votes the downvoting or all voting?
Or the hiding of the votes?

Is +10 +0 that much different than +10 -10?

Or perhaps a limit to the downvoting.

It's all about perception anyways.

We could separate the upvotes and downvotes, so it is similar to how YouTube does it. You see how many upvotes a post has and how many downvotes it has.

Hiding is the worst, ordering by net "vote score" is next, and general 'this post is trash' is also a thing. I'm personally OK with upvotes, although there is the debatable aspect of whether they discourage posting and discussion. At the moment, I don't personally care much either way whether there are upvotes, but downvotes are absolute trash. Curiously, I wouldn't necessarily mind ordering by net "vote score" if it was just upvotes, I think. I can probably offer deeper thoughts about the matter if needed (e.g. if it seems like there's a significant chance that something's going to change), but right now I'm not convinced it's great use of my time.