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I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really vote som

I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really vote something down should be if something is off topic or against the rules, in which case you have a report button. If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasonable response. I also know that since visibility is based on how your score matches up to others, some people will just go and vote down every other recent question so theirs stands out more (unless stack overflow has protection against such things, I know it happens on similar sites) I can maybe see an argument for answers to questions being down vote-able, since people may sometimes give answers that are wrong/misleading but maybe not to such a degree that they deserve to be expunged by moderators.

eternalny1 7y ago
On StackOverflow, a decent amount of site reputation is required before one can down-vote.
- adossi 7y ago
  You also lose 1 reputation for down-voting which helps prevent people from getting too trigger happy
  - Avamander 7y ago
    1 rep doesn't matter at all for high-rank people, the rep loss should be based on total rep.
    - snazz 7y ago
      It should be something like 1% of your reputation. That’s significant enough to make even high-rank users have to think.
      - Swenrekcah 7y ago
        High ranking users do not like your proposal! (parent comment is gray at this time) Edit: wow I’m tired. I read this whole thread thinking of HN instead of SO. Time to go home and rest..
      - golergka 7y ago
        As for now at least, all operations on reputation are addition-based and therefore commutative: their order doesn't matter, and undoing an operation returns your reputation to the previous state. With this 1% rule, however, it breaks down. For example, if you downvote someone when you have 1000 reputation points, and then undo the downvote and downvote him again when you have 10,000, it means that you'll lose 9 points for nothing.
      - maest 7y ago
        This also makes sense as high-rank users usually have a constant stream of rep coming from their answers/questions. So, not only do high-rank users have lots of rep, they also gain rep at an accelerated pace (on average).
        umvi 7y ago
        "The rich keep getting richer." Same phenomenon happens everywhere.
      - luckylion 7y ago
        If you punish moderation, you end up with an unmoderated site. You don't want a million "help. please write this code for me. thanks" posts, as any legitimate question will be lost in the noise and nobody will waste time "answering" (aka working for free) those questions. SO works because it discourages super-low-effort questions and has a lot of moderation (both by official moderators and high-rep users).
      - michaelmrose 7y ago
        Forums require lots of downvotes to keep out the riff raff making them that precious would be a mistake.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    Interesting, I had no idea of this
  - baud147258 7y ago
    Only on answers. You can downvote questions without any damage to your rep. And even then the damage is trivial.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - deleted 7y ago
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- baud147258 7y ago
  It's 125 points, which can be acquired with, for example, 63 edits, which have to be validated by other users.
vasili111 7y ago
Here is my proposal for removing downvotes but people do not like it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252338/downvote-system-change-proposal https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252338/downvote-sys...
- sergiotapia 7y ago
  The responses are the reason I stopped using the site in 2013. The ego on these schnooks lol
- mholt 7y ago
  That's ironic
  - baud147258 7y ago
    In case of post on meta, the downvotes means "I disagree with this proposal", not that the question isn't good.
    - Avamander 7y ago
      Disagreement doesn't mean they're right about the proposal though.
    - notatoad 7y ago
      Which is kind of a perfect example of how downvotes are a bad interface - what they mean is context-sensitive, and needs to be explained. If meta had an explicit "disagree" flag, instead of an obtuse "downvote" that users have to intuit the meaning of, it wouldn't have to be explained in a HN comment.
  - chucksmash 7y ago
    Not as ironic as you'd think[1]. [1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/47635 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/47635
- einpoklum 7y ago
  Here is a discussion of requiring leaving feedback when downvoting: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436
girst 7y ago
https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs has downvote explanations[1]: when you want to vote a post/comment down, you're required to state why (pick from a list). Since the user can see why they're downvoted, misuse hardly an issue. I think such a system could work for stackoverflow too: provide reasons like [off-topic, hostile, spam, ...], but don't provide others ([stupid-question, too-easy, ...]). [1]: https://lobste.rs/about#downvotes https://lobste.rs/about#downvotes
- mLuby 7y ago
  Wish HN had a similar thing. Downvotes can mean a bunch of things, including: 1. "This isn't welcome here." Should be flagged instead, and often is. 2. "This is factually incorrect but I won't comment as to why." I view this as lazy at best, and giving cover to #3 at worst. 3. "I disagree with this." Frankly this is the worst use of the downvote. If you disagree, say why (respectfully)! Tags in Stack Overflow are pretty common (while they're not here) so I'd expect this approach to work better over there (first).
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    >3. "I disagree with this." Frankly this is the worst use of the downvote. // Downvoting to show disagreement is endorsed by the primary directing mind of HN (pg). I agree that I'd like to see disagreement and quality indicators separated. Personally I like the Slashdot voting system: multiple dimensions with meta-moderation, and ability to boost certain types of material so you see more of it (so for example if you're really anti-humour then you can hide it all by giving comments ranked as humorous a large negative "bonus" in your personal scheme). This issue you raise is one I, and others, raised several times and basically got told "the owners like it that way, put up and shut up".
- jgtrosh 7y ago
  Instead of not providing reasons you don't agree with, it would be better UI to provide them but if selected deny the action with an explanation. I think I saw this done on TripleByte's website during the sign-up process where they filter applications outside of the US (and a few other criteria) with an explanation and a promise that they were trying to fix this. That form of UI is unusual but very friendly.
ravenstine 7y ago
I haven't used SO in a while, and one of the reasons I abandoned it was because all it took was for one malfeasant to tick the downvote button on my questions without providing a reason why and nobody would take my question seriously. It seems like everyone just assumed that a question with a -1 vote wasn't worth addressing.
deleted 7y ago
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timvisee 7y ago
I sometimes come across badly formatted or unclear questions when reviewing new posts. I usually flag those, but not all flags are accepted possibly because they aren't bad enough. That's why I use the down vote button as well. Note that I never down vote because some question is not interesting or not up my league. So, in some sense I find this button useful. Maybe a reason could be attached to the down vote button, such as [Unclear, Off-topic, Spam, Whatever, ...] as some form of lightweight flagging system. Lobste.rs uses this on comments. Users that can't select a 'Not interesting' option are probably less likely to vote down.
jolmg 7y ago
It happens here too. I imagine some people only downvote stuff that's against the site guidelines and simply doesn't upvote stuff they disagree with. Then, there are others that do downvote those with opinions different from theirs. On StackOverflow, I've wondered if I should upvote answers on topics where I can't really verify if the answer is correct, even if it looks really informative, well formatted, has pictures, is to the point, etc. I mean, what if it's wrong? and there I am upvoting it because it looks credible. I have seen highly upvoted answers with information I know to be wrong, too. Part of the issue is that there are no guidelines on how to upvote or downvote in neither StackExchange or HN. The platforms just leave it to the users to determine their own criteria.
- dang 7y ago
  People wouldn't follow such criteria anyway.
  - mceachen 7y ago
    What if downvotes led to a popdown, with a series of radio buttons: ( ) I don't agree with this comment ( ) This comment is factually incorrect ( ) This comment is offtopic ( ) This comment is rude or inappropriate (Add and replace verbiage to taste, of course) Then people's downvotes would be imbued with some semblance of nuance. And get rid of the score, and make downvote categories have hidden negative values (so people are truthful in their answer).
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Then people's downvotes would be imbued with some semblance of nuance. Downvotes or not for nuance or dialog, that's what comments are for. Downvotes are solely to demote content that is viewed, in the subjective opinion of the voter, as not contributing to productive discussion. If it deserves a nuanced response then it doesn't deserve a downvote.
      - jolmg 7y ago
the_duke 7y ago
Agreed on no downvotes for questions. For answers, I would also do away with the downvote button, and offer multiple options instead, like: "does not answer the question", "misleading information", "off topic", "outdated", "i don't like the solution", ... . That would still give SO the capability to sort answers based on some quality ranking algorithm and hopefully reduce the unwarranted downvoting. PS, this line from the article perfectly captures how I perceive much of Stackoverflow over the past few years: > “look how stupid that guy is, and look how clever I am pointing that out with my downvote!”
- jxfreeman 7y ago
  Or downvote until the score is zero. I.e. don’t allow negative scores. Then take reputation away from people who actively attempt to downvote beyond zero. In addition, you use reputation to downvote.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - rbonvall 7y ago
    Downvoting already has a small reputation cost: https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down
    - bewuethr 7y ago
      Not on questions, though.
      - wruza 7y ago
        (to this subthread) Let’s remember that score is not money, and many people actually do not care if reputation is reduced by automated means (as opposed to someone’s view on their acting). Score is just a raw signal to a participant on whether they did good or not. It never was a “win all the score non-decreasingly” game. If you spend 30% of your 10k on downvotes, it is still credible 7k. And if you gain 10k and see 3k problems, then these are community problems indeed. My guess is that downvoting costs score only to weed out low-score inexperienced accounts from emotional voting or manipulation. No effort no score. No score no downvotes. –> no effortless misbehavior. That’s it.
jasode 7y ago
>If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasonable response. Just remember that if you don't give users a built-in and formal downvote button, they will rebel against that UI and invent an informal downvote mechanism to express their disapproval. E.g. a bunch of stackoverflow users would type "-1 downvote" in the comments. If you think a downvote button is bad, a UI that encourages a pollution of "-1" meta comments may be even worse. (Similar examples of users bypassing web UI limitations would be Github users typing "+1" into issues threads because there's no upvote button.) Let's say you have 3 rough categories when judging a question such as : (1) agree / approve --> upvote (2) apathy / don't know answer --> no vote, do nothing (3) disagree / disapprove of low-effort question --> downvote If you architect the web UI to collapse categories (2) and (3) into "no vote" to minimize "hurt feelings" and thus give voters no outlet to express a "downvote", don't be surprised if users rebel and invent adhoc ways to do it anyway. If you read through the meta thread mentioned in the sibling comment by vasili111, you'll see the well-respected high-karma SO users like John Skeet, etc use the downvote button as a feedback mechanism for bad questions. ### EDIT reply to those (galaxyLogic, randcraw, etc) suggesting forcing downvotes into the comments area: On the surface, it sounds logical and reasonable to force explanation of downvotes but that doesn't work for high-traffic sites like StackOverflow. (In 2011, Jeff Atwood tried to explain this.[1][2][3][4]) The issue is the asymmetry of work between bad questions and good questions. It's easy to ask bad questions. It's harder to ask well-researched and high-effort questions. This asymmetry inevitably results in the SO site being flooded with bad questions. Therefore, forcing a "downvote explanation" just adds friction to the goal of filtering out the massive volume of bad questions. This was the rationale why downvotes on questions don't cost any karma. I.e. forcing downvote-commentary works better for low-traffic sites and small communities but not for high-traffic sites. [1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... [2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-prevent-some-of-the-low-quality-questions-from-entering-our-system https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-preven... [3] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-people-to-explain-downvotes https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-peo... [4] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/250177/require-a-comment-explaining-the-reason-for-the-first-downvote-on-a-question https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/250177/require-a-co...
galaxyLogic 7y ago
Yes I think "report" -button would be a much better solution. But, it seems the company that owns Stack Overflow SAVES MONEY by not hiring people to filter out improper questions. Rather they rely on the free "help" of the community. Which also means they can hide behind the community. It is not Stack Overflow that is rude to you, it is some users, some bad apples. SO takes no responsibility. And saves money.
bachmeier 7y ago
Make downvotes require a comment. Let other users vote on the reasoning. If it's a BS reason like "Duplicate! Duplicate!" that's wrong, let others erase that vandalism from the site. One of the stupidest things on the internet is when someone comments that it's a duplicate question and then posts something that makes it obvious they read neither the question nor the supposed duplicate. Most downvotes are never explained. After too much vandalism, suspend the user.
- jasode 7y ago
  >Make downvotes require a comment. I cited some meta SE threads about that idea in my other comment but I forgot to add this thread as well: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/why-isnt-providing-feedback-mandatory-on-downvotes-and-why-are-ideas-suggestin https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/why-isnt-pro... Forcing comments on downvotes looks reasonable but it doesn't work at the high-traffic scale of StackOverflow. [To downvoters, (1) are there any other discussion websites with comparable high traffic to StackOverflow that have forced-downvote-explanations so we can see if they work ... and (2) are you aware of the degraded-signal-noise-ratio reason in 2011 that Jeff Atwood made downvotes easier (free) instead of harder?]
  - mcguire 7y ago
    Maybe "high traffic scale" is a problem?
    - jasode 7y ago
      >Maybe "high traffic scale" is a problem? I honestly can't tell if your comment is snark or some type of realistic actionable advice. If you intended actionable, what exactly do you propose SO to do to not be "high-traffic"? One of the meta threads say they got ~12k questions a day. (Most of them bad.) Should SO set a limit of 500 questions and after that, each person gets an error on the webform saying "Sorry, we've reached our max question limit today. We want to stay a low-traffic site so hope you'll understand!" To recap some SO history from Atwood's posts... 2008 - StackOverflow is opened 2010 - Atwood and others notice they're getting inundated with too many bad questions. At this time downvoting questions cost karma. 2011 - To counteract the high volume of low-quality questions, they made downvoting questions free to remove friction.[1] Atwood noticed that users were too restrained in downvoting the questions and didn't exercise that power enough to clean up the site. Therefore, forcing the downvotes to have comments (add friction) is the opposite of what they were trying to solve in 2010 which was quickly suppressing the bad questions. SO has more traffic now in 2019 than back in 2011. Perhaps some that are suggesting the idea of forced downvote explanations (I admit that it sounds like a wonderful feedback mechanism) -- don't know of SO's scale and the problems they had in 2010? I dunno. [1] Jeff Atwood announced change of policy -- "Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”. [...] So, it’s imperative the question list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty for those users who do take the time to read a question and later find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to that." -- excerpt from : https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
weinzierl 7y ago
If I remember correctly in early Stack Overflow down-voting did cost your own reputation points, so every down-vote reduced your own reputation. I liked this and I claim it socialized me in a way that I rarely down-vote even today and even on other platforms like HN. I like to imagine that every down-vote lowers my own reputation even if that isn't expressed in points and even if no one knows. Every down-vote is a trade-off where I feel the benefit of expressing my own negative opinion outweighs my own reputation loss. Obviously the system didn't work for Stack Overflow, otherwise they wouldn't have abandoned it, I don't remember why. EDIT: Seems the system is still in place. Down-voting an answer costs one reputation point, down-voting a question is free.[1] For reasons for the asymmetry see [2]. [1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reput... [2] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251610/why-does-downvoting-an-answer-cost-reputation-while-questions-not https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251610/why-does-dow...
- zabzonk 7y ago
  > If I remember correctly in early Stack Overflow down-voting did cost your own reputation points, so every down-vote reduced your own reputation. Still does.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
I'd love a filter to reduce the number of questions with 0 upvotes in the 'interesting' feed. Most stuff in that feed is obviously not interesting (0 upvotes, plenty of views, no answers, older than 30 minutes, reputation < 10). This is easily 70 percent of that feed. The 'hot' feed is even more ridiculous. It's 90% obvious crap. Hot by definition should not have any posts with low numbers of upvotes/views or worse, negative scores. Better filtering options would be helpful. I'd love to review unanswered recent questions by reputable users. I don't care about seeing questions with 0 upvotes, older than 30 minutes and more than 20 views. There is currently no good way to list these. You either end up with questions from years ago that had lots of upvotes but no answer or an endless list of low quality crap that was recently modified or asked. I've pretty much disengaged from even looking at the Stackoverflow feed of new questions because the signal to noise ratio just went out of the window in recent years. There's a lot of signal dropping out of these feeds because of all the freshly signed up users wasting people's time. Stackoverflow has plenty of ways to earn reputation but no good ways to filter on that. IMHO fixing that is the answer. The site needs a more efficient way to get rid of the obviously crappy questions (and the people asking them) because the volume of both is just killing engagement currently. For answers, I think the existing up/downvote mechanism works fine though the site could maybe do with a bit less passive aggressive style moderation/commenting. The way answer sorting works, the good stuff ends up on top anyway. So there's less of a need to intimidate people that are trying to be helpful but failing for whatever reason because their impact is less high. I tend to bias to being grateful somebody took the time to read and answer my questions even if it ultimately is not that helpful.
- tripzilch 7y ago
  Why are things older than 30 minutes uninteresting?
didibus 7y ago
I think the voting system is fine. But why close down a question!! What's the harm in answering more questions even if not quite apropos? I feel people try to categorize too much for no good reasons. Oh this question shouldn't be asked here? As if it's the 1980s and people browse the web using categories. I get it for people answering. They follow a tag and answer questions and ideally they don't want to see questions about things they can't answer. So seeing unrelated questions can be seen as spam from that angle. But there has to be a better way. That might be why I find Quora has more potential. You can just tag whatever. Wrong tag. Just tag it with an appropriate tag done. Maybe we don't need to segregate Q/A sites. That said, I don't like Quoras layout and UXquite as much for code.
Izkata 7y ago
There's an additional rarely-noticed feature tied to downvotes, that no one considers when they propose this: If a post gets a huge number in a tiny duration (like, -10 in under a minute after being posted), a bot will close and delete the post. This is a way for regular users to immediately eliminate inappropriate content, such as porn or advertisements. I've seeing it go off many many times in my years at the SciFi stackexchange.

eternalny1 7y ago

On StackOverflow, a decent amount of site reputation is required before one can down-vote.

adossi 7y ago
You also lose 1 reputation for down-voting which helps prevent people from getting too trigger happy
- Avamander 7y ago
  1 rep doesn't matter at all for high-rank people, the rep loss should be based on total rep.
  - snazz 7y ago
    It should be something like 1% of your reputation. That’s significant enough to make even high-rank users have to think.
    - Swenrekcah 7y ago
      High ranking users do not like your proposal! (parent comment is gray at this time) Edit: wow I’m tired. I read this whole thread thinking of HN instead of SO. Time to go home and rest..
    - golergka 7y ago
      As for now at least, all operations on reputation are addition-based and therefore commutative: their order doesn't matter, and undoing an operation returns your reputation to the previous state. With this 1% rule, however, it breaks down. For example, if you downvote someone when you have 1000 reputation points, and then undo the downvote and downvote him again when you have 10,000, it means that you'll lose 9 points for nothing.
    - maest 7y ago
      This also makes sense as high-rank users usually have a constant stream of rep coming from their answers/questions. So, not only do high-rank users have lots of rep, they also gain rep at an accelerated pace (on average).
      - umvi 7y ago
        "The rich keep getting richer." Same phenomenon happens everywhere.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      If you punish moderation, you end up with an unmoderated site. You don't want a million "help. please write this code for me. thanks" posts, as any legitimate question will be lost in the noise and nobody will waste time "answering" (aka working for free) those questions. SO works because it discourages super-low-effort questions and has a lot of moderation (both by official moderators and high-rep users).
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      Forums require lots of downvotes to keep out the riff raff making them that precious would be a mistake.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  Interesting, I had no idea of this
- baud147258 7y ago
  Only on answers. You can downvote questions without any damage to your rep. And even then the damage is trivial.
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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baud147258 7y ago
It's 125 points, which can be acquired with, for example, 63 edits, which have to be validated by other users.

vasili111 7y ago

Here is my proposal for removing downvotes but people do not like it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252338/downvote-system-change-proposal https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252338/downvote-sys...

sergiotapia 7y ago
The responses are the reason I stopped using the site in 2013. The ego on these schnooks lol
mholt 7y ago
That's ironic
- baud147258 7y ago
  In case of post on meta, the downvotes means "I disagree with this proposal", not that the question isn't good.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    Disagreement doesn't mean they're right about the proposal though.
  - notatoad 7y ago
    Which is kind of a perfect example of how downvotes are a bad interface - what they mean is context-sensitive, and needs to be explained. If meta had an explicit "disagree" flag, instead of an obtuse "downvote" that users have to intuit the meaning of, it wouldn't have to be explained in a HN comment.
- chucksmash 7y ago
  Not as ironic as you'd think[1]. [1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/47635 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/47635
einpoklum 7y ago
Here is a discussion of requiring leaving feedback when downvoting: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436

girst 7y ago

https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs has downvote explanations[1]: when you want to vote a post/comment down, you're required to state why (pick from a list). Since the user can see why they're downvoted, misuse hardly an issue. I think such a system could work for stackoverflow too: provide reasons like [off-topic, hostile, spam, ...], but don't provide others ([stupid-question, too-easy, ...]). [1]: https://lobste.rs/about#downvotes https://lobste.rs/about#downvotes

mLuby 7y ago
Wish HN had a similar thing. Downvotes can mean a bunch of things, including: 1. "This isn't welcome here." Should be flagged instead, and often is. 2. "This is factually incorrect but I won't comment as to why." I view this as lazy at best, and giving cover to #3 at worst. 3. "I disagree with this." Frankly this is the worst use of the downvote. If you disagree, say why (respectfully)! Tags in Stack Overflow are pretty common (while they're not here) so I'd expect this approach to work better over there (first).
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  >3. "I disagree with this." Frankly this is the worst use of the downvote. // Downvoting to show disagreement is endorsed by the primary directing mind of HN (pg). I agree that I'd like to see disagreement and quality indicators separated. Personally I like the Slashdot voting system: multiple dimensions with meta-moderation, and ability to boost certain types of material so you see more of it (so for example if you're really anti-humour then you can hide it all by giving comments ranked as humorous a large negative "bonus" in your personal scheme). This issue you raise is one I, and others, raised several times and basically got told "the owners like it that way, put up and shut up".
jgtrosh 7y ago
Instead of not providing reasons you don't agree with, it would be better UI to provide them but if selected deny the action with an explanation. I think I saw this done on TripleByte's website during the sign-up process where they filter applications outside of the US (and a few other criteria) with an explanation and a promise that they were trying to fix this. That form of UI is unusual but very friendly.

ravenstine 7y ago

I haven't used SO in a while, and one of the reasons I abandoned it was because all it took was for one malfeasant to tick the downvote button on my questions without providing a reason why and nobody would take my question seriously. It seems like everyone just assumed that a question with a -1 vote wasn't worth addressing.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

timvisee 7y ago

I sometimes come across badly formatted or unclear questions when reviewing new posts. I usually flag those, but not all flags are accepted possibly because they aren't bad enough. That's why I use the down vote button as well. Note that I never down vote because some question is not interesting or not up my league. So, in some sense I find this button useful. Maybe a reason could be attached to the down vote button, such as [Unclear, Off-topic, Spam, Whatever, ...] as some form of lightweight flagging system. Lobste.rs uses this on comments. Users that can't select a 'Not interesting' option are probably less likely to vote down.

jolmg 7y ago

It happens here too. I imagine some people only downvote stuff that's against the site guidelines and simply doesn't upvote stuff they disagree with. Then, there are others that do downvote those with opinions different from theirs. On StackOverflow, I've wondered if I should upvote answers on topics where I can't really verify if the answer is correct, even if it looks really informative, well formatted, has pictures, is to the point, etc. I mean, what if it's wrong? and there I am upvoting it because it looks credible. I have seen highly upvoted answers with information I know to be wrong, too. Part of the issue is that there are no guidelines on how to upvote or downvote in neither StackExchange or HN. The platforms just leave it to the users to determine their own criteria.

dang 7y ago
People wouldn't follow such criteria anyway.
- mceachen 7y ago
  What if downvotes led to a popdown, with a series of radio buttons: ( ) I don't agree with this comment ( ) This comment is factually incorrect ( ) This comment is offtopic ( ) This comment is rude or inappropriate (Add and replace verbiage to taste, of course) Then people's downvotes would be imbued with some semblance of nuance. And get rid of the score, and make downvote categories have hidden negative values (so people are truthful in their answer).
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Then people's downvotes would be imbued with some semblance of nuance. Downvotes or not for nuance or dialog, that's what comments are for. Downvotes are solely to demote content that is viewed, in the subjective opinion of the voter, as not contributing to productive discussion. If it deserves a nuanced response then it doesn't deserve a downvote.
    - jolmg 7y ago

the_duke 7y ago

Agreed on no downvotes for questions. For answers, I would also do away with the downvote button, and offer multiple options instead, like: "does not answer the question", "misleading information", "off topic", "outdated", "i don't like the solution", ... . That would still give SO the capability to sort answers based on some quality ranking algorithm and hopefully reduce the unwarranted downvoting. PS, this line from the article perfectly captures how I perceive much of Stackoverflow over the past few years: > “look how stupid that guy is, and look how clever I am pointing that out with my downvote!”

jxfreeman 7y ago
Or downvote until the score is zero. I.e. don’t allow negative scores. Then take reputation away from people who actively attempt to downvote beyond zero. In addition, you use reputation to downvote.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rbonvall 7y ago
  Downvoting already has a small reputation cost: https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down
  - bewuethr 7y ago
    Not on questions, though.
    - wruza 7y ago
      (to this subthread) Let’s remember that score is not money, and many people actually do not care if reputation is reduced by automated means (as opposed to someone’s view on their acting). Score is just a raw signal to a participant on whether they did good or not. It never was a “win all the score non-decreasingly” game. If you spend 30% of your 10k on downvotes, it is still credible 7k. And if you gain 10k and see 3k problems, then these are community problems indeed. My guess is that downvoting costs score only to weed out low-score inexperienced accounts from emotional voting or manipulation. No effort no score. No score no downvotes. –> no effortless misbehavior. That’s it.

jasode 7y ago

>If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasonable response. Just remember that if you don't give users a built-in and formal downvote button, they will rebel against that UI and invent an informal downvote mechanism to express their disapproval. E.g. a bunch of stackoverflow users would type "-1 downvote" in the comments. If you think a downvote button is bad, a UI that encourages a pollution of "-1" meta comments may be even worse. (Similar examples of users bypassing web UI limitations would be Github users typing "+1" into issues threads because there's no upvote button.) Let's say you have 3 rough categories when judging a question such as : (1) agree / approve --> upvote (2) apathy / don't know answer --> no vote, do nothing (3) disagree / disapprove of low-effort question --> downvote If you architect the web UI to collapse categories (2) and (3) into "no vote" to minimize "hurt feelings" and thus give voters no outlet to express a "downvote", don't be surprised if users rebel and invent adhoc ways to do it anyway. If you read through the meta thread mentioned in the sibling comment by vasili111, you'll see the well-respected high-karma SO users like John Skeet, etc use the downvote button as a feedback mechanism for bad questions. ### EDIT reply to those (galaxyLogic, randcraw, etc) suggesting forcing downvotes into the comments area: On the surface, it sounds logical and reasonable to force explanation of downvotes but that doesn't work for high-traffic sites like StackOverflow. (In 2011, Jeff Atwood tried to explain this.[1][2][3][4]) The issue is the asymmetry of work between bad questions and good questions. It's easy to ask bad questions. It's harder to ask well-researched and high-effort questions. This asymmetry inevitably results in the SO site being flooded with bad questions. Therefore, forcing a "downvote explanation" just adds friction to the goal of filtering out the massive volume of bad questions. This was the rationale why downvotes on questions don't cost any karma. I.e. forcing downvote-commentary works better for low-traffic sites and small communities but not for high-traffic sites. [1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... [2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-prevent-some-of-the-low-quality-questions-from-entering-our-system https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-preven... [3] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-people-to-explain-downvotes https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-peo... [4] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/250177/require-a-comment-explaining-the-reason-for-the-first-downvote-on-a-question https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/250177/require-a-co...

galaxyLogic 7y ago

Yes I think "report" -button would be a much better solution. But, it seems the company that owns Stack Overflow SAVES MONEY by not hiring people to filter out improper questions. Rather they rely on the free "help" of the community. Which also means they can hide behind the community. It is not Stack Overflow that is rude to you, it is some users, some bad apples. SO takes no responsibility. And saves money.

bachmeier 7y ago

Make downvotes require a comment. Let other users vote on the reasoning. If it's a BS reason like "Duplicate! Duplicate!" that's wrong, let others erase that vandalism from the site. One of the stupidest things on the internet is when someone comments that it's a duplicate question and then posts something that makes it obvious they read neither the question nor the supposed duplicate. Most downvotes are never explained. After too much vandalism, suspend the user.

jasode 7y ago
>Make downvotes require a comment. I cited some meta SE threads about that idea in my other comment but I forgot to add this thread as well: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/why-isnt-providing-feedback-mandatory-on-downvotes-and-why-are-ideas-suggestin https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/why-isnt-pro... Forcing comments on downvotes looks reasonable but it doesn't work at the high-traffic scale of StackOverflow. [To downvoters, (1) are there any other discussion websites with comparable high traffic to StackOverflow that have forced-downvote-explanations so we can see if they work ... and (2) are you aware of the degraded-signal-noise-ratio reason in 2011 that Jeff Atwood made downvotes easier (free) instead of harder?]
- mcguire 7y ago
  Maybe "high traffic scale" is a problem?
  - jasode 7y ago
    >Maybe "high traffic scale" is a problem? I honestly can't tell if your comment is snark or some type of realistic actionable advice. If you intended actionable, what exactly do you propose SO to do to not be "high-traffic"? One of the meta threads say they got ~12k questions a day. (Most of them bad.) Should SO set a limit of 500 questions and after that, each person gets an error on the webform saying "Sorry, we've reached our max question limit today. We want to stay a low-traffic site so hope you'll understand!" To recap some SO history from Atwood's posts... 2008 - StackOverflow is opened 2010 - Atwood and others notice they're getting inundated with too many bad questions. At this time downvoting questions cost karma. 2011 - To counteract the high volume of low-quality questions, they made downvoting questions free to remove friction.[1] Atwood noticed that users were too restrained in downvoting the questions and didn't exercise that power enough to clean up the site. Therefore, forcing the downvotes to have comments (add friction) is the opposite of what they were trying to solve in 2010 which was quickly suppressing the bad questions. SO has more traffic now in 2019 than back in 2011. Perhaps some that are suggesting the idea of forced downvote explanations (I admit that it sounds like a wonderful feedback mechanism) -- don't know of SO's scale and the problems they had in 2010? I dunno. [1] Jeff Atwood announced change of policy -- "Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”. [...] So, it’s imperative the question list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty for those users who do take the time to read a question and later find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to that." -- excerpt from : https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...

weinzierl 7y ago

If I remember correctly in early Stack Overflow down-voting did cost your own reputation points, so every down-vote reduced your own reputation. I liked this and I claim it socialized me in a way that I rarely down-vote even today and even on other platforms like HN. I like to imagine that every down-vote lowers my own reputation even if that isn't expressed in points and even if no one knows. Every down-vote is a trade-off where I feel the benefit of expressing my own negative opinion outweighs my own reputation loss. Obviously the system didn't work for Stack Overflow, otherwise they wouldn't have abandoned it, I don't remember why. EDIT: Seems the system is still in place. Down-voting an answer costs one reputation point, down-voting a question is free.[1] For reasons for the asymmetry see [2]. [1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reput... [2] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251610/why-does-downvoting-an-answer-cost-reputation-while-questions-not https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251610/why-does-dow...

zabzonk 7y ago
> If I remember correctly in early Stack Overflow down-voting did cost your own reputation points, so every down-vote reduced your own reputation. Still does.

jillesvangurp 7y ago

I'd love a filter to reduce the number of questions with 0 upvotes in the 'interesting' feed. Most stuff in that feed is obviously not interesting (0 upvotes, plenty of views, no answers, older than 30 minutes, reputation < 10). This is easily 70 percent of that feed. The 'hot' feed is even more ridiculous. It's 90% obvious crap. Hot by definition should not have any posts with low numbers of upvotes/views or worse, negative scores. Better filtering options would be helpful. I'd love to review unanswered recent questions by reputable users. I don't care about seeing questions with 0 upvotes, older than 30 minutes and more than 20 views. There is currently no good way to list these. You either end up with questions from years ago that had lots of upvotes but no answer or an endless list of low quality crap that was recently modified or asked. I've pretty much disengaged from even looking at the Stackoverflow feed of new questions because the signal to noise ratio just went out of the window in recent years. There's a lot of signal dropping out of these feeds because of all the freshly signed up users wasting people's time. Stackoverflow has plenty of ways to earn reputation but no good ways to filter on that. IMHO fixing that is the answer. The site needs a more efficient way to get rid of the obviously crappy questions (and the people asking them) because the volume of both is just killing engagement currently. For answers, I think the existing up/downvote mechanism works fine though the site could maybe do with a bit less passive aggressive style moderation/commenting. The way answer sorting works, the good stuff ends up on top anyway. So there's less of a need to intimidate people that are trying to be helpful but failing for whatever reason because their impact is less high. I tend to bias to being grateful somebody took the time to read and answer my questions even if it ultimately is not that helpful.

tripzilch 7y ago
Why are things older than 30 minutes uninteresting?

didibus 7y ago

I think the voting system is fine. But why close down a question!! What's the harm in answering more questions even if not quite apropos? I feel people try to categorize too much for no good reasons. Oh this question shouldn't be asked here? As if it's the 1980s and people browse the web using categories. I get it for people answering. They follow a tag and answer questions and ideally they don't want to see questions about things they can't answer. So seeing unrelated questions can be seen as spam from that angle. But there has to be a better way. That might be why I find Quora has more potential. You can just tag whatever. Wrong tag. Just tag it with an appropriate tag done. Maybe we don't need to segregate Q/A sites. That said, I don't like Quoras layout and UXquite as much for code.

Izkata 7y ago

There's an additional rarely-noticed feature tied to downvotes, that no one considers when they propose this: If a post gets a huge number in a tiny duration (like, -10 in under a minute after being posted), a bot will close and delete the post. This is a way for regular users to immediately eliminate inappropriate content, such as porn or advertisements. I've seeing it go off many many times in my years at the SciFi stackexchange.