Facebook Seeks User Feedback on Plan to End Voting System Democracy can be difficult, especially for a multibillion dollar public company. In 2009, Facebook decided it was a good idea for its users to vote on certain policy changes. This week, the company announced it was no longer a good idea. Under the old rules, a vote was triggered if a policy change received more than 7,000 comments. If 30 percent of all active users voted on a policy, their views had to be considered. Now that its number of users is close to the population of China, which has more than a billion people, Facebook said it plans to end that process. In a letter posted on Facebook on Wednesday, the vice president for communications, public policy and marketing, Elliot Schrage, said the company "found that the voting mechanism, which is triggered by a specific number of comments, actually resulted in a system that incentivized the quantity of comments over their quality." "Therefore, we're proposing to end the voting component of the process in favor of a system that leads to more meaningful feedback and engagement," he continued. That, he offered, would include the opportunity to submit questions to the company's chief privacy officer, Erin Egan. Facebook sent an e-mail to its users apprising them of the change. They have until Wednesday to submit comments. If at least 7,000 pour in, it will trigger a vote. The announcement was made along with several other notable proposed changes, including a plan for Facebook to share data with Instagram, the photo sharing site it acquired this year. That means the company can use data accumulated by Instagram to build broader, unified profiles of Facebook users. Google, Facebook's biggest Web rival, already gathers data on its users from its various products, including e-mail and search. The changes come as Facebook seeks to shore up its share price, which closed at $24.32 on Wednesday, far below the $38 initial public offering in May. Under the proposed changes, Facebook would also no longer let users control who can send them e-mails, using the e-mail address issued by Facebook.com; it would instead offer "new filters for managing incoming messages," according to Mr. Schrage's blog post. That post prompted thousands of comments in a matter of hours on Facebook's site governance page. Users complained about a raft of things. A few seemed to endorse the change, but there were many naysayers. "I understand the issues of quantity vs. quality," wrote one user, named Paul Tousignant, "but the proposed new system is much more opaque than the existing one. This is, after all, a social platform, if it people feel too much like what happens here is out of their hands and managed in a back office, their loyalty will be fragile. You guys have the best critical mass of users, but there *are* alternatives. David Clemens wrote: "I am a grandparent and all my friends are grandparents. All of us have kids on facebook, who post things mostly to us. It seems to me like there are lots of us. We are OLD and we do not like or tolerate constant change. It is unclear whether the proposed changes will incur scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission. Facebook last year settled charges of having deceived its users with making personal information more widely available than intended. The company faces audits of its privacy policies for the next 20 years.