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The biggest problem is downvoting. Downvoting is toxic. A better change would have been to make any downvote COST 10 points. Or at least 1 point or 2.

CharlesColeman 7y ago
> The biggest problem is downvoting. > Downvoting is toxic. I disagree. Ignoring SO's dubious classifications of what's on/off-topic. The last couple questions I've posted have been shit-shows of off-topic comments and answers. If you ask a hard question, a lot of people seem to only want to uselessly question what you're doing then answer a different, easier question. Those are totally worthless, and force me to waste a lot of time writing really defensive questions that try to nip the derails in the bud. Honestly, SO should have some feature where the asker can just delete responses as off-topic. > A better change would have been to make any downvote COST 10 points. Or at least 1 point or 2. IIRC, it already costs 1 karma point to downvote an answer. I would guess it's the same for a question.
- james-skemp 7y ago
  It did cost points to downvote questions, but they rolled that back (seemingly 2011): - https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down - https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
KKPMW 7y ago
I would urge you, or anyone who thinks that downvoting is toxic for this matter, to volunteer in moderating questions written by new users for a day or two. Once you see a constant flood of "I made app, here my 1000 lines of code (screenshot), I get error, where bug?" that the moderators have to defend the site against - you might just change your opinion about the value of downvotes.
- andrewstuart 7y ago
  I'm not saying there should not be a mechanism for regulating that sort of stuff. BUT on StackOverflow it is entirely normal, even expected, that you post a well thought out and reasoned question and its instantly downvoted because, well, who knows why? Drive-by downvoting is simply negative. A different mechanism could be used for the sorts of issues you identify.
  - jasode 7y ago
    >A different mechanism could be used for the sorts of issues you identify. Would the new proposed mechanism require more volunteer work or the same effort as now? Btw, many people forget that back in 2011, Jeff Atwood was concerned that there was too much crap and the community was not downvoting enough. Therefore, he removed the points penalty to encourage the community to aggressively downvote more: https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
  - thrower123 7y ago
    Is this really the common behavior? I feel like I live in a different world... Maybe I do; I don't ask a ton of questions, and when I do they are usually on pretty small niche tags, but the last several times I've asked something, I've wound up with a friendly soul suggest something within an hour or two that's gotten me pointed in the right direction.
  - triceratops 7y ago
    What if downvoting required leaving an anonymized comment?
  - Ajedi32 7y ago
    Can you point to an example of a "well thought out and reasoned question" on SO that's at a negative score? In my experience, that just doesn't happen. Most questions sit at a score of 0, and those which do receive votes are almost always upvoted. (The data supports this[1].) Questions rarely end up with a negative score, and when they do it's usually because there are obvious problems with their formatting or content. (Usually low effort, off topic, or an obvious duplicate.) [1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1096887/question-score-frequency-whole-site#resultSets https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1096887/q...
jerrac 7y ago
Agreed. Down voting is toxic. Though, rather than costing points, I'd prefer to see the voter required to explain why they are down voting. As small as it is, a down vote is a public action saying that the person posting what you are voting on has less value. At least that what they said has less value. That is never a fun experience, even if you have very thick skin.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  I always explain why I downvote, unless there already is a clear explanation. Why do I downvote? I downvote when an answer is wrong or outdated. That's the point of downvotes, to push incorrect or outdated answers to the bottom.
  - jerrac 7y ago
    Good. I'm glad you explain. That doesn't make it any less of a public reprimand. In polite society, when you reprimand someone publicly, you only do so when private discussions have failed. I'd also argue using down votes for outdated information is very inefficient. Wouldn't it make sense to just have a "this is out dated" flag, and list how many people have used it? Then, the author of the answer could update their post and ask that the flag be cleared. For wrong answers, I'd say a comment "this is wrong because" first, then something other than down voting.
    - dkersten 7y ago
      > I'd say a comment "this is wrong because" first, then something other than down voting. I guess its just as much a signal to people looking for an answer as it is for the person who wrote the answer. At least with a downvoted answer, its easy to see "ok, maybe not this one" and you can check the comments to see why. Not that I'm a fan of downvoting, I think a flagging system would achieve the same thing while being more helpful to all involved than an opaque downvote.
    - papln 7y ago
      SO is a crowd-sourced FAQ, not a conversation forum.
WatchDog 7y ago
It already does cost a point. SO heavily encourages leaving constructive feedback rather than simply downvoting.
leepowers 7y ago
It's hard to be the recipient of downvotes. At the same time it's a great tool for assessing the quality of posts. It's the same reason HN allows downvotes. However the dynamic of SO is different. Users are coming to the site to get help and solve problems, not to have open-ended discussions. SO should have a grace period for new questions. No downvotes during the first 1-2 hours. Aside from being less discouraging for new users it would also mitigate cases of incorrect downvoting. A negative score is a signal to other users that a question is not worth consideration, and dissuades possible answerers from providing a solution.
- papln 7y ago
  A simple solution is to count downvotes but truncate the UI to 0. That way you don't get the ego sting of a negative score.
the_jeremy 7y ago
The problem is that people have different ideas of what a downvote means. To someone who has spent a ton of time answering questions, it means "this is not a well-written question and I do not have the time to explain to the poster why that is; I would rather spend my time on answering well-written questions, which is what I came to this site to do." To a question asker, it means "you suck and I hate your question, and I'm not going to tell you why." The problem is that there are a couple of mechanisms for getting rid of questions - downvoting, or flagging / voting to close. Some questions are clearly on the wrong site - just close them. Some questions are not good questions (screenshots of code, no explanation of desired behavior, no research done into error message) but they are not closeable according to the options provided. The downvote is just to send a message. Answerers who downvote are people who genuinely want to help - they are spending their free time answering questions on the internet for no gain other than extremely localized imaginary internet points. The solution is providing one method of feedback to the question poster, and couching it in a less negative way. Maybe all methods have the asker's feedback get hit, maybe none of them. Maybe the asker should be protected from feedback until they learn the site. Asking technical questions properly is hard. I got downvoted and closed and duplicate questions on my first 5 attempts, and even my recent questions have 0-1 upvotes (my answers fare better, for whatever reason).
- BeetleB 7y ago
  > Answerers who downvote are people who genuinely want to help - they are spending their free time answering questions on the internet for no gain other than extremely localized imaginary internet points. I think it's more accurate to say that answerers who downvote want to give answers (vs genuinely want to help). Because explaining to someone why their question is problematic is part of helping.
  - KKPMW 7y ago
    This is more nuanced. And StackOverflow as a website themselves are part to blame. They cannot seem to make up their mind if they are there to help the people who ask questions, or if their task is to construct a database of problem-answer pairs for future reference, like a type of programming encyclopedia. For the longest time everyone on the site believed it to be the "database" model. And helping individual users with their questions is not part of it. Under this framework answerers who downvote are simply doing what they are expected to do - weeding out poor entries from the encyclopedia. And the person who asks a question has no right to expect an answer, as stated in their 2011 blog entry: > We believe asking questions on our site is a privilege, not a right. [1] However recently they seem to be moving away from that model and only time will tell what it morphs in to. [1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
LanceH 7y ago
I find this is true on questions with the Go tag. They can't seem to let a question languish at zero. Or just downvote it once to -1, they have to hammer it. Upvotes are rare, so on balance the entire page of go questions frequently has a negative balance. For a great many tags, it seems like there is a sport to show that a question doesn't apply to a specific tag, that it is a duplicate, or that the user should be doing something a different way than what they are asking for. There seems to be so much effort put into deliberately not answering the question that trying to participate is truly deflating.
chapium 7y ago
As an experiment downvoting is disabled on some smaller reddit subs. The effect in the gaming /hobbiest communities is they get overrun with memes and content designed to get a reaction. Theres an overwhelming number of readers who never participate in discussions but will upvote the most mindless stuff. You can see consensus in a forum that few enjoy the content, yet it gets strongly upvoted if unchecked.
FooHentai 7y ago
>Downvoting is toxic Can you elaborate? It's difficult to agree or disagree since I can't tell what you have in mind. What does 'Toxic' mean to you in this context?

CharlesColeman 7y ago

> The biggest problem is downvoting. > Downvoting is toxic. I disagree. Ignoring SO's dubious classifications of what's on/off-topic. The last couple questions I've posted have been shit-shows of off-topic comments and answers. If you ask a hard question, a lot of people seem to only want to uselessly question what you're doing then answer a different, easier question. Those are totally worthless, and force me to waste a lot of time writing really defensive questions that try to nip the derails in the bud. Honestly, SO should have some feature where the asker can just delete responses as off-topic. > A better change would have been to make any downvote COST 10 points. Or at least 1 point or 2. IIRC, it already costs 1 karma point to downvote an answer. I would guess it's the same for a question.

james-skemp 7y ago
It did cost points to downvote questions, but they rolled that back (seemingly 2011): - https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down - https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...

KKPMW 7y ago

I would urge you, or anyone who thinks that downvoting is toxic for this matter, to volunteer in moderating questions written by new users for a day or two. Once you see a constant flood of "I made app, here my 1000 lines of code (screenshot), I get error, where bug?" that the moderators have to defend the site against - you might just change your opinion about the value of downvotes.

andrewstuart 7y ago
I'm not saying there should not be a mechanism for regulating that sort of stuff. BUT on StackOverflow it is entirely normal, even expected, that you post a well thought out and reasoned question and its instantly downvoted because, well, who knows why? Drive-by downvoting is simply negative. A different mechanism could be used for the sorts of issues you identify.
- jasode 7y ago
  >A different mechanism could be used for the sorts of issues you identify. Would the new proposed mechanism require more volunteer work or the same effort as now? Btw, many people forget that back in 2011, Jeff Atwood was concerned that there was too much crap and the community was not downvoting enough. Therefore, he removed the points penalty to encourage the community to aggressively downvote more: https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
- thrower123 7y ago
  Is this really the common behavior? I feel like I live in a different world... Maybe I do; I don't ask a ton of questions, and when I do they are usually on pretty small niche tags, but the last several times I've asked something, I've wound up with a friendly soul suggest something within an hour or two that's gotten me pointed in the right direction.
- triceratops 7y ago
  What if downvoting required leaving an anonymized comment?
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  Can you point to an example of a "well thought out and reasoned question" on SO that's at a negative score? In my experience, that just doesn't happen. Most questions sit at a score of 0, and those which do receive votes are almost always upvoted. (The data supports this[1].) Questions rarely end up with a negative score, and when they do it's usually because there are obvious problems with their formatting or content. (Usually low effort, off topic, or an obvious duplicate.) [1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1096887/question-score-frequency-whole-site#resultSets https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1096887/q...

jerrac 7y ago

Agreed. Down voting is toxic. Though, rather than costing points, I'd prefer to see the voter required to explain why they are down voting. As small as it is, a down vote is a public action saying that the person posting what you are voting on has less value. At least that what they said has less value. That is never a fun experience, even if you have very thick skin.

gwbas1c 7y ago
I always explain why I downvote, unless there already is a clear explanation. Why do I downvote? I downvote when an answer is wrong or outdated. That's the point of downvotes, to push incorrect or outdated answers to the bottom.
- jerrac 7y ago
  Good. I'm glad you explain. That doesn't make it any less of a public reprimand. In polite society, when you reprimand someone publicly, you only do so when private discussions have failed. I'd also argue using down votes for outdated information is very inefficient. Wouldn't it make sense to just have a "this is out dated" flag, and list how many people have used it? Then, the author of the answer could update their post and ask that the flag be cleared. For wrong answers, I'd say a comment "this is wrong because" first, then something other than down voting.
  - dkersten 7y ago
    > I'd say a comment "this is wrong because" first, then something other than down voting. I guess its just as much a signal to people looking for an answer as it is for the person who wrote the answer. At least with a downvoted answer, its easy to see "ok, maybe not this one" and you can check the comments to see why. Not that I'm a fan of downvoting, I think a flagging system would achieve the same thing while being more helpful to all involved than an opaque downvote.
  - papln 7y ago
    SO is a crowd-sourced FAQ, not a conversation forum.

WatchDog 7y ago

It already does cost a point. SO heavily encourages leaving constructive feedback rather than simply downvoting.

leepowers 7y ago

It's hard to be the recipient of downvotes. At the same time it's a great tool for assessing the quality of posts. It's the same reason HN allows downvotes. However the dynamic of SO is different. Users are coming to the site to get help and solve problems, not to have open-ended discussions. SO should have a grace period for new questions. No downvotes during the first 1-2 hours. Aside from being less discouraging for new users it would also mitigate cases of incorrect downvoting. A negative score is a signal to other users that a question is not worth consideration, and dissuades possible answerers from providing a solution.

papln 7y ago
A simple solution is to count downvotes but truncate the UI to 0. That way you don't get the ego sting of a negative score.

the_jeremy 7y ago

The problem is that people have different ideas of what a downvote means. To someone who has spent a ton of time answering questions, it means "this is not a well-written question and I do not have the time to explain to the poster why that is; I would rather spend my time on answering well-written questions, which is what I came to this site to do." To a question asker, it means "you suck and I hate your question, and I'm not going to tell you why." The problem is that there are a couple of mechanisms for getting rid of questions - downvoting, or flagging / voting to close. Some questions are clearly on the wrong site - just close them. Some questions are not good questions (screenshots of code, no explanation of desired behavior, no research done into error message) but they are not closeable according to the options provided. The downvote is just to send a message. Answerers who downvote are people who genuinely want to help - they are spending their free time answering questions on the internet for no gain other than extremely localized imaginary internet points. The solution is providing one method of feedback to the question poster, and couching it in a less negative way. Maybe all methods have the asker's feedback get hit, maybe none of them. Maybe the asker should be protected from feedback until they learn the site. Asking technical questions properly is hard. I got downvoted and closed and duplicate questions on my first 5 attempts, and even my recent questions have 0-1 upvotes (my answers fare better, for whatever reason).

BeetleB 7y ago
> Answerers who downvote are people who genuinely want to help - they are spending their free time answering questions on the internet for no gain other than extremely localized imaginary internet points. I think it's more accurate to say that answerers who downvote want to give answers (vs genuinely want to help). Because explaining to someone why their question is problematic is part of helping.
- KKPMW 7y ago
  This is more nuanced. And StackOverflow as a website themselves are part to blame. They cannot seem to make up their mind if they are there to help the people who ask questions, or if their task is to construct a database of problem-answer pairs for future reference, like a type of programming encyclopedia. For the longest time everyone on the site believed it to be the "database" model. And helping individual users with their questions is not part of it. Under this framework answerers who downvote are simply doing what they are expected to do - weeding out poor entries from the encyclopedia. And the person who asks a question has no right to expect an answer, as stated in their 2011 blog entry: > We believe asking questions on our site is a privilege, not a right. [1] However recently they seem to be moving away from that model and only time will tell what it morphs in to. [1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...

LanceH 7y ago

I find this is true on questions with the Go tag. They can't seem to let a question languish at zero. Or just downvote it once to -1, they have to hammer it. Upvotes are rare, so on balance the entire page of go questions frequently has a negative balance. For a great many tags, it seems like there is a sport to show that a question doesn't apply to a specific tag, that it is a duplicate, or that the user should be doing something a different way than what they are asking for. There seems to be so much effort put into deliberately not answering the question that trying to participate is truly deflating.

chapium 7y ago

As an experiment downvoting is disabled on some smaller reddit subs. The effect in the gaming /hobbiest communities is they get overrun with memes and content designed to get a reaction. Theres an overwhelming number of readers who never participate in discussions but will upvote the most mindless stuff. You can see consensus in a forum that few enjoy the content, yet it gets strongly upvoted if unchecked.

FooHentai 7y ago

>Downvoting is toxic Can you elaborate? It's difficult to agree or disagree since I can't tell what you have in mind. What does 'Toxic' mean to you in this context?