This was a question posed to me earlier, and although it's only been a few weeks since the change, I guess it's worth a look.....
On the 2nd May 2019, Steemit Inc relabeled flags as downvotes and changed the icon from a red flag to a downvote button which now sits next to, you guessed it, the upvote button.
As with any change, there are differing opinions but for what it's worth, I agree with this one from both a usability and marketing perspective. Moving the button and making it look like the opposite of the upvote button is logical, and bringing the functionality into the line of sight (away from the naughty corner) may help reduce the stigma around feature, or not.
More or less?
Only 23 days have passed since the change, and so the data might not tell too much, but this is how all downvotes since the first of April look:
Not a really a noticeable change there but May looks lower on average.
What if we remove the top 15 downvoters?
'spaminator','mack-bot','realcleaner','lyndsayblowes','cheetah','camillesteemer','dumb-as-an-ox','trollshunter','shit-posts','scruffyjunkies','iflagtrash','abusereports','steemcleaners','plentyofphish','flags4pedos'
Hmm, downvotes are on a downtrend, but this looks to have been the case since mid-April.
The next two charts relate to the number of accounts doing the downvoting each day, and the number of unique accounts being downvoted each day.
Again, the average is lower for May than April.
Although some interesting spikes here as on a couple of days in the past week or so, over 1000 unique users have received a downvote. I would guess that these votes are scripted following the uncovering of a comment/spam farm or two.
This last piece of data looks at the downvotes as a percentage of the total votes cast during the timeframe used in the above charts.
| Time period | Percentage of Downvotes |
|---|---|
| 1st April - 24th May | 0.00556% |
| 1st April - 1st May | 0.00564% |
| 2nd May - 24th May | 0.00546% |
We need 4 decimal points before any changes can be seen, such is the low number of downvotes compared to the total votes cast on any given day.
And yes, as a percentage, there have been fewer downvotes since the 2nd April.
Need more incentive?
It seems that thus far, relabeling and moving the button has not encouraged more downvoting.
Perhaps what is being discussed on the post linked below will have more of an impact?
https://steemit.com/steem/@vandeberg/downvote-pool-deep-dive
Cheers
Asher
