Although I think this is a terrible idea, I wish I could downvote your feature request. "Downvoting" does not bring anything good to this type of platform, it would lead to political games and other unhelpful herd responses.

If I was on staff, I'd look at how many votes there are for a certain thing as part of a decision making process. It shows support, while no vote for something shows no support.

Terrible idea... but it's not like LL can do it. Canny doesn't have this feature at all and they have no intention on adding downvotes at all because they believe in positivity design.

If I could downvote some requests I would… please add a button!

As a Reddit mod .. I can only say that this idea stinks.

We do not need opportunity to play games. up-vote my thing, down-vote yours, dog piles, botting, personal politics, disagreements spilling over and so on.

The order or priority of stuff getting worked on does not depend in any way on on how many votes it has. Linden do what Linden gonna do.

No need for downvote as at the end LL decides. What matters is how many people are interested by a feature not to enter into a fight in between downvote vs upvote.

In balance the feed is done to express motivated opinions, including those not agreeing .. not just "press button ideas" without any explanation. And the feed is done for LL to also see / understand those opinions / take them into acoount (or not).

This is indeed a huge oversight in how this site works, and it has been a problem on the Jira already, however, as the Jira was a much more technical platform, there were fewer random, thoughtless, inconsiderate suggestions - there were still a lot of them, but on Canny it is overwhelming.

It is important to give everyone a chance to tell their opinion and ideas, because a barrier like Jira's complexity obviously prevented some people from ever sharing their ideas there. However it is just as important to keep things in balance, so if we are to encourage free speech and expression, we must have the ability to disagree as well. And not only in the comments which then most people will never read, but via a clear indicator such as a downvote option.

It is becoming alarmingly popular nowadays that feedback platforms only allow positive feedback, so if you don't support something that will have negative effects on you, you have no other option to represent yourself. This way a minority of people can make suggestions that only benefit them, recruit several people inworld or on Discord to push the upvote button here, and make it look like it would be a highly demanded feature or change, whereas they simply tricked the poorly designed system and there was no way to statistically indicate that the suggestion wasn't popular.

This should be changed, and the best way to do so would be to apply a similar up- and downvote system as the questions and answers section of the forums. Counting upvotes and downvotes separately, but featuring an overall rating based on the upvotes and downvotes, where a negative rating would clearly indicate an unpopular suggestion, and a positive rating maintained even against some downvotes would reinforce the popularity of a good suggestion.

I love this idea. I'd recommend if this is possible to design it like this so that we can also see the delta in yellow (up votes minus downvotes), and also display negatives if the vote goes the other direction, in blue (colors chosen for colorblind compatibility). Check images: