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I was expecting horrible questions, basically spam. Nope, these are real and legitimate questions and I don't see why most of these were downvoted. I wonder wha

I was expecting horrible questions, basically spam. Nope, these are real and legitimate questions and I don't see why most of these were downvoted. I wonder what the data looks like beyond just some of the worst questions, and whether the trend is going to be more and more "legitimate questions that are either 'obvious' or already answered get downvoted." If so, that cannot be a good thing.

lambda 12y ago
The actual spam and completely incoherent questions are deleted. So what you're left with is things that are actually legitimate questions, so don't merit admins intervening and deleting, but which touch a nerve in some other way; like people asking about how to send out large volumes of (presumably) unsolicited email, people asking homework questions, and the like. Also, note that some of these "most downvoted questions" are also among the most upvoted as well, having very large positive scores, like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-name-of-the-operator https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-name.... Once a question becomes famous enough, there are likely to be a number of contrarians who don't like it and downvote it, and eventually that can add up. And then if you look in the comments of some of them, that seems to be not too bad but which have more downvotes than you'd expect, they got a downvote brigade because they complained about a few downvotes on meta. Pretty lame that people do that, but it happens.
hurin 12y ago
Most down-voted doesn't mean it hadn't been upvoted, it just means a lot of the people looking at it thought it was a bad question. This one made me chuckle: What is the name of the “-->” operator?
- lmm 12y ago
  Before I clicked through I thought that was going to be a scalaz question.
pascal_cuoq 12y ago
These are only questions that for some reason received a lot of visibility and as a consequence were seen by more people who thought they weren't interesting. They were also seen by more people who thought they were great questions and upvoted them. The only conclusion I draw from this database query is that “most downvoted” is not an interesting metric. You are right that these are old. The only way for a question to be in the top ranks for visibility is to have had a long time to be visible over. This doesn't mean that duplicate questions do not get asked, answered and upvoted. Too much so in my opinion.

lambda 12y ago

The actual spam and completely incoherent questions are deleted. So what you're left with is things that are actually legitimate questions, so don't merit admins intervening and deleting, but which touch a nerve in some other way; like people asking about how to send out large volumes of (presumably) unsolicited email, people asking homework questions, and the like. Also, note that some of these "most downvoted questions" are also among the most upvoted as well, having very large positive scores, like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-name-of-the-operator https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-name.... Once a question becomes famous enough, there are likely to be a number of contrarians who don't like it and downvote it, and eventually that can add up. And then if you look in the comments of some of them, that seems to be not too bad but which have more downvotes than you'd expect, they got a downvote brigade because they complained about a few downvotes on meta. Pretty lame that people do that, but it happens.

hurin 12y ago

Most down-voted doesn't mean it hadn't been upvoted, it just means a lot of the people looking at it thought it was a bad question. This one made me chuckle: What is the name of the “-->” operator?

lmm 12y ago
Before I clicked through I thought that was going to be a scalaz question.

pascal_cuoq 12y ago

These are only questions that for some reason received a lot of visibility and as a consequence were seen by more people who thought they weren't interesting. They were also seen by more people who thought they were great questions and upvoted them. The only conclusion I draw from this database query is that “most downvoted” is not an interesting metric. You are right that these are old. The only way for a question to be in the top ranks for visibility is to have had a long time to be visible over. This doesn't mean that duplicate questions do not get asked, answered and upvoted. Too much so in my opinion.