Supporters are greatly appreciated. You technically still have your voting power. But it only works for upvotes now. The main reason I pay for Supporter despite being on the staff is to get rid of ads on my mobile.

This. Extra voting power remains, but as no one can downvote at all, it's just for upvoting.

P.S. If anyone has any ideas for additional perks they'd like to see for Supporter status we very much welcome suggestions!

For supporters no, but my suggestion is the ability to ignore certain users be available to all. That is a feature that is available on other places for free, to anyone. Also, how this works ? Do you not see his posts ? or he is banned for you at all times ? Is he seeing your posts ? How is it exactly ? Also I think with this ability open to everyone, some folks who don't like each other, can ignore each other, and never ever need to interact together again. Less work, time, and nerves for both of them. And in some instances even for the moderators as well, if it go so far. If it's needed for some reason (possibly to not ignore everyone left and right) there may be a limit, for example everyone can ignore only up to 3 users, or 5 users on the forum.

Other idea I have is instead of "agree" under forum posts, to implement an option like the reactions on facebook, not many, but just a few, to be simpler. For example, love, cry, angry, thumbs up, laugh, and maybe surprise. Is it possible or it will be too complicated to implement ?

Every user should receive around 1-3 free "ignores" Imo and then each subsequent Supporter increases the amount, so it could go something like 2 (Free) - 4 (Bronze) - 6 (Silver) - Any Amount (Gold). Those are random numbers. Honestly if I wasn't a Mod I would ignore some users, Lmao.

I'm sorry I missed the initial discussion on this. I've been occupied with some other stuff lately, so spending less time on this site. I thought I had still been checking in everyday, but I must have missed a day or two....

I dislike this change. I think that what we have done here is reduce interactivity, which is very bad for a website that relies on interactivity to remain relevant. I enjoyed seeing which comments got up/downvotes, and I occasionally came back to threads for the sole purpose of seeing whether my comments, as well as interesting comments made by others, were up or down voted.

I agree that votes were used for various purposes by various people. Some of those purposes seemed pretty stupid to me. But, that didn't take away from my interest in seeing where the votes went, nor did it take away from my interest in placing votes. In fact, while I did find it frustrating if a comment I made (or a good comment by someone else) was downvoted for seemingly stupid reasons, it still drove me to come back to the site. So, even when it bothered me, it was still driving engagement.

From my perspective, this change has just cut the value of the system in half. It's too soon for me to say whether it reduces my interest by half (it probably doesn't go that far). But, it certainly reduces my interest to some extent, which means fewer visits to the comment threads.

If it were up to me, I would bring down votes back, but eliminate the feature that hides comments after 10 down votes. I don't see any value in that at this point (I understand why it was originally implemented, but I don't think that applies at this time).

I think it would also be nice if we could see a count for both up and down votes.

Tl;dr - The lifeblood of this site is interactivity. Why intentionally reduce ways to interact? 

Posted in the other thread as I didn't see this one, but yeah, bring back downvotes.

Without them, troll comments are getting boosted by console warriors.