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.
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].
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and offer multiple options instead, like: "does not answer the question", "misleading information", "off topic", "outdated", "i don't like the solution", ...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!”
The Accepted Answer from 2009 is stuck to the top and you have to scroll while simultaneously scanning comments and weighing the Submit Date and Up votes.
The problem. Stack Overflows commenting system is like a lawyers idea of fact finding. Everyone gives an answer and votes like a jury would with the mods acting as harsh judges. This is why SO just gets more and more toxic over time.
What you want is a communal Socratic method. Where everyone goes round and round till the community produces a good solid answer.
That site is so good for finding in-depth discussion of topics. Just a lot of people throwing ideas around, way more useful for finding leads and inspiration compared to the fairly bland Wikipedia articles many of the topics have.
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.
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.
> 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", ... .
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.
I agree that we should make downvotes only ok with a comment.
But then again there's a fine line that both side seem to constantly walk over. 30% of question consists of "how to do this on my homework, please submit a full solution", while the other 30% that are legitimate question being over zealously patrolled.
> 30% of question consists of "how to do this on my homework, please submit a full solution"
I've suggested a few times already that part of this problem might be that asking questions is the first privilege you get and you get it for free.
If it costs something people would be more careful.
The cost can be anything:
- Classify 5 answers correctly
- Pick answers from a multiple choice
- Pay a dollar
- Wait a few days to activate
- etc
Ideally the user should be able to choose a method that suits them but make the account worth something.
As long as accounts are free, activate instantly and comes with a free right to ask questions, stop being surprised that new accounts pop up to ask silly questions.
It'd be interesting if the cost were something like "vote on these items in the moderation queue", and they'd only get through if they voted in line with existing votes (with a few new items mixed in).
The idea being to help cut down on work for mods by getting some prioritization based on new/young user votes. By mixing in topics that have been voted on, the user can be convinced that they have to vote honestly, and by gathering a large number of votes on actual posts mixed in, things can be roughly classified reliably.
By voting I'm referring to things like whether or not a question is a duplicate of another etc.
You could also have a gradual onboarding process, this should help a bit but might be over the top :
- first: multiple choice. You get 5 good questions and 5 good or bad answers. For each of the questions you have to answer if the answer is good or bad.
- Next: 5 known questions, that might be good or bad. You have to answer if it is good or bad.
- Finally: the moderation queue where the answer is only used as an weak signal to the actual moderators.
Success rate of 100% required for stage 1, 60% for stage 2 and just completion for stage 3.
This would leave a new user with a good understanding of what the site is for before they can spam.
It will also make their account seem somewhat valuable.
And if someone wants to pay someone to take their test, fine with me, at least the account isn't free anymore.
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?]
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-...
Then they're breaking the code of conduct, and should have their accounts suspended. That's a lot better than letting them keep their reasoning silent.
It's not so simple, you can post snappy/disrespectful comments that skim the line and create an unfriendly atmosphere for a very long time.
It's a hard problem, because it's about patterns. Everyone has a bad day and posts a badly worded comment every once in a while; I certainly have. That's okay, it's human nature. The problems start when a small group of people do it all the time, and turns out it's rather hard to actually detect those kind of patterns.
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.
Roughly, it seems downvotes are used by people to indicate not enough effort has gone into the question (easily researched, duplicate question, confusing/poor english, etc).
So either all unflagged questions is valid and should be nurtured into clear, well-written queries or pointed to existing questions, or questions are to be judged* "good-faith" or "lazy" by users and the latter receive downvotes.
*This judgement is fixed in time; the question is not necessarily re-judged if improvements are made.
What's the problem with being lazy? If you are even lazier, just don't answer. If it's a duplicate, just link it to the delicate question. Having useless questions shouldn't be a problem while searching for answers.
The problem is that just looking through the queue of unanswered questions takes effort.
If I have a list of good, honestly-asked questions, I'm willing to look for a few that I know how to answer and answer them. If I have a vast pile of "plz do this homework for me [transcribed question with errors or link to a private PDF]" then I just won't use Stack Overflow.
All SO tags I've ever followed the number of people answering is greater than the people asking, so that's not really an issue, I think. Although, maybe, it felt that way due to down voting.
The case you described is easy to identify and you can just leave a comment, which will be useful to both: other people answering questions and the person asking. Different from the down vote.
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.
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.
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.
I can see the appeal of the idea but I don't think it would be a source of good information in practice. Most people won't say "I don't agree" when they can say a comment is wrong or bad instead. My instinct is that it would just lead to even more bickering about downvoting, the exact opposite of what we want.
Then we (and in extreme cases, you) could at least review it and point out if the reasons where nuts (i.e. if an answer has 5 downvotes for wrong then we can factcheck it and point it out)
I'm mentioning lobste.rs for the second time in this discussion, but lobste.rs has this and it works kind of well IMO, both to think twice when I downvote and also to try to figure out why someone was downvoted.
Then again, lobste.rs is a different community and there is a reason or maybe several why I hang both here and there :-)
The counterargument is that, just as with downvote-reason-giving, downvote-reason-reviewing would be dominated by the same forces as downvoting in the first place. You wouldn't get more signal, just more complexity, plus a lot more work—both because of the reviewing itself, and because of meta-quarrels about reasons and reason-reviews.
HN's approach is to stick with something simple, accept that it has downsides as well as upsides, and resist the temptation to fiddle with the downsides by sacrificing simplicity. It's a strong temptation for a technical person to want to do that, of course, but there's a strong story why the downsides of downvoting are mostly intrinsic: disapproval stings. Most of what people say when they complain about the downvote system seems to boil down to that. That's not a technical problem. If there's something we can do to mitigate it, it would more likely come from helping the culture to evolve. I do think that's happened, and is happening, a little; it's just very slow.
You can't draw conclusions from how downvoting works on smaller sites to what HN should do. With online communities, size is the dominant variable. When there are order-of-magnitude size differences between communities, that is what explains why things work differently there—not subtle software design choices. Similarly, one can't draw conclusions from how HN works to larger sites like Reddit. One of the nice things about HN not having to try to grow ambitiously (it has grown linearly at more or less the same slope for many years) is that we can focus on being the best HN-sized-thing we can be. That leads to subtler, more qualitative kinds of growth.
A couple more points that bang around in my head when issues like this come up...
One form of complexity that's particularly important to resist is adding metadata and creating metasystems in order to compensate for things in the core system. The magical charm of all things meta gives that step a perennial allure. But it's often a mistake. If you go meta to handle something that isn't truly orthogonal to the core system, you end up with more of a mess. I think we have a case of this here. For example, when a comment is wrong, the way to address that is to reply with correct information. Why do we need a popup with a "wrong" selection? The core system—discussion threads—can already accommodate this function; we don't need a metasystem for it. Of course it doesn't accommodate it perfectly, but the imperfection is not for technical reasons, it's because people don't always agree about what's right vs. wrong, and so on. A metasystem doesn't fix those things, it just recreates them on another level. And now, as they say, you have two problems, plus the problem of how the two interfere with each other.
It gets worse. With any system, there are only so many complexity cards you get to play. Each time you play one, you lose the chance to use that card for something else. In the software world, often people don't know this and because they're under pressure, a system blows through its complexity budget—plays all its cards—near the beginning of its lifecycle, depriving it forever of the chance to be coherent or tractable as it grows. This is the root of the fatalistic complaints about software bloat that commonly come up in HN discussions, as well as the constant yearning to create new systems rather than be stuck, as most of us are, fiddling with a couple screws in some rusty component of a massive machine that nobody understands. It happens that, from a technical point of view, HN is a rare exception to this pattern. For a bunch of reasons, two of which were pg's minimalism and Lisp sensibility, and another of which was perhaps that the project has always been resource-constrained, HN escaped the fate of becoming more complex than it needed to be. Preserving that quality is a priority, because it allows us to work with the system in rich ways that are impossible on most production software projects.
Selfishly, I would appreciate it if HN would adopt downvote reasons because Lobsters has to acculturate people used to how HN does things. Occasionally they're outraged that we do not have downvote-to-disagree when a mod contacts them to ask that they stop picking random reasons to do so. If HN would be so kind as to train several million programmers in the UI and norms I'd appreciate it.
Less tongue-in-cheek, I do think flag/downvote reasons are worth the added complexity for us, but as there's a cultural component to these design issues it's probably a non-starter for HN to adopt. A change in such a fundamental interaction on the site would be an upheaval that's not justified by probability and size of an expected benefit.
+1 on basically your entire message, especially recognizing the limits of mods and size as dominant variable on roughly everything to do with communities. Best of luck.
> 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.
> Downvotes are solely to demote content that is viewed, in the subjective opinion of the voter, as not contributing to productive discussion.
Says who? It's not in the guidelines, so really when to use the feature is determined by its effects. Downvoting obscures comments and hurts a user's karma. So in reality, downvoting is to demote content you don't want yourself or others to see for whatever reason and/or to "hurt" (for lack of a better word) other users.
Your criteria of doing it based on whether it contributes to productive discussion fits in that, but it's not the only possible criteria users may determine for themselves.
mceachen's suggestion is to modify the effects to make the possible criteria space more narrow and more similar to the criteria you shared. When they see such a popdown, they'd have a better idea of what the downvote is meant to be used for. It would provide some guidance on the "proper" use of the feature.
So the person asking the question is supposed to understand what each individual was thinking based on a single click? I don't see how this is possible.
Slashdot worked a bit like that. So does Lobste.rs. IMO that ends up worse - users are better at figuring out what kind of comments are bad for the site than a mod having to define it all up front.
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).
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.
>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.
I use this approach on a service of mine that is built around a community. It works, I recommend it. When you hit 0 and someone tries to downvote further, it informs you that that action is impossible (no user supplied content can be voted into negative territory). I regard negative point voting to be an unnecessary form of community punishment. If something is spam, abusive, or otherwise breaks the rules, then it needs removed. If a user persists in posting that type of content, they get removed.
In a decent community you don't get punched in the face for asking an ignorant or lazy question. Instead, you do not get any reward or positive feedback for it (upvotes, attention to the question). The default of decency is a neutral, respectful treatment to others; a floor of dignity. People can learn how to better contribute without being either subtly or overtly attacked or bullied.
I also give downvotes an expense, they cost points (they subtract from your account score), and I increase the cost as it makes sense. So a user must earn the ability to downvote through contribution. If the system has too much downvoting, you can gently alter that behavior by ramping the cost overall and individually (if a given user is prone to downvoting heavily, you increase their cost beyond the base system cost).
Good point and here is some nueance from a book I read right now regarding parenting and their main point is to neither punish or rate performance (good nor bad). What you should aim for albeit hard, is to relate to the childrens feelings instead. This translates well into adults. Rather than saying, "this report was super good, well done!" say "What a great feeling I get when I read the report" or "Feels good with the report being complete?"
Thought experiment:
You say that reaching below 0 is punishing and getting more than 0 shows that your question is good. You get feedback that you've done great work writing the question. How would it look like when the site relates to your feeling when writing and contributing to the site? Would it work even if you remove score all together?
Giving rewards result in people seeking awards. Which may seem like a wise thing but aiming for self confidence is way better. Which is obvious but may be good to point out anyhow.
When you hit 0 and someone tries to downvote further, it informs you that that action is impossible
If the system knows the item is rated zero, then why even give the option of downvoting at all? Conditionally remove the control and you remove the need to display an error message.
Even simpler solution: present a downvote button, make it show a "downvoted" label on the item to the user who pressed it, don't have it change the actual score at all.
An alternative form of downvote is to reply with a negative comment. This makes a lot of sense since upvotes imply that you agree with all or most of the post while a downvote reveals nothing about what part of the post you dislike or why.
I've now for a couple years suggested that tweak to Hacker News, with the modification that either a refutation or an upvote on a refutation would qualify you to downvote.
>And it's very effective to provide "feedback" in the form of a drive-by downvote, isn't it?
I understand your confusion and frustration but folks like Jon Skeet are also providing feedback to their fellow answerers who don't want to see bad questions.
For some people, this signaling mechanism to reduce wasted effort for peers is even higher priority than feedback to the person asking the question.
Nobody's forced to read SO questions. Optimizing the site to maximize the probability that users feel stupid is not IMO the best choice. It doesn't take much time to add a comment. You could even let the downvoter select a reason from a menu.
Yes, you're absolutely correct. However, you're not realizing that the truth you stated (free-will volunteer vs conscript/slave) is actually the reason why users are not getting mandatory comments from downvoters.
Because StackOverflow can't force desirable expert answerers like Jon Skeet to look at SO questions, they have to keep some social mechanisms in place to keep the site attractive and tolerable for him and his peers. (E.g. Jon Skeet doesn't want to leave mandatory comments for every downvote and many of his expert peers agree with him. So far, StackOverflow & Jeff Atwood also agrees with them: make downvotes easier not harder.)
>Optimizing the site to maximize the probability that users feel stupid is not IMO the best choice.
It's certainly possible to believe SO's philosophy is fundamentally flawed and the rules need to be changed to favor the question asker over the answerers and if Jon Skeet doesn't like it he can fuck off. Well, I don't think SO has determined that the "brain drain" is worth it.
Look at the Skeet's profile[1]. He's probably the top C# and Java expert on that site. One of his most-upvoted answers is to the question, "Why is subtracting these two times (in 1927) giving a strange result?" The very tiny number of C# programmers with the expert skills to answer that question are outnumbered by the masses of people that ask stupid questions.
It doesn't seem like your suggested changes take into account the asymmetry of the bad overwhelming the good. The resource constraints of Q&A site are the minority of experts capable of answering the questions with quality answers. SO noticed that resource constraint in 2010 and that's why it prioritizes highly valuable contributors like Jon Skeet over random people who can ask any bad question.
This question does not show any research effort
This question is unclear
This question is not useful
that is (almost) literally the title text of the downvote button. I think people just don't like the shape of the button and the idea of negative numbers.
I think downvoting in most places is partially a service to others who can sort by score and thus avoid reading crap.
A large portion of the people posting stupid low effort crap on internet forums are impossible to educate. If you spent your time trying you wouldn't do anything productive.
The internet being what it is someone will surely tell them what is wrong with their posts. If they get 17 downvotes and one person tells them why is that not sufficient?
It would be much better if users added their down-votes in the comments because then they would feel some need to explain why they down-vote something. In fact I think IT SHOULD BE REQUIRED to give a reason for your down-vote (if down-votes are allowed in general)
An SO down-vote is not simply an "opinion", it affects your karma-score, perhaps even your chances of getting hired.
FWIW, I've done this before ("I downvoted you because...") and the question asker, instead of trying to improve their question, got combative/defensive which is not necessarily desirable either.
It's lose/lose. Don't tell them why and they get frustrated, tell them why and they get defensive. It takes a rare user to take the feedback and use it to improve their question.
It's easier than you think. And I've thought that I was doing the right thing for a long time except I wasn't. Any time you explain something you first need to establish that you are on the same level as the submitter, then you can give advice. Like, "I see that you really tried with this question and you almost made it, if we rephrase it a bit it would improve even further!" It's true that most people have a problem with listening on feedback, but maybe it's a chicken and egg problem and you may be the solution to just that individual. We need to have a major postitive uplift on the forums of the Internet and you may be just that :)
> most people have a problem with listening on feedback
That is so true, even people giving negative feedback have trouble when they get negative feedback from someone else. Therefore I think the system, the site, should make it easier to give positive feedback, than negative.
To you know bring about a positive community feeling. The purpose of the site should be to help its users not to make oneself the over-arbiter of what is correct what is not.
Facebook has its share of problems but excessive unexplained down-votes is not one of them.
Make it possible to only be positive and you will reach a better goal. Rather than moderate the users, moderate the mods such every response they give is purely positive.
This will spread and people will cling on. Soon you will reach self moderation due to the positive nature of the community.
Learning to accept feedback is much about learning that you may actually receive positive feedback and that your self worth is enough.
So I was listening to l to this guy Jim Thuresson which is a mental coach. His life is basically breathing positiviness, and his take on it is, it works, you shoukd do it too. If you fill your head space with 100% positive thoughts there's no room for anything negative. Maybe going on strong here, but it's such an important message. I just winder how we bring that thought onto the Internet.
Why do you think that their obligation derives from how you imagine their downvote will effect your life instead of the rules of the site?
Neither stack overflow nor your fellow users are obliged to you beyond the standards set by the site and general human decency.
It takes 1 second to downvote a low value comment. It might take 5-20 minutes of conversing with a stranger who is likely to respond rudely to criticism. Less voting means less curation means wading through more lower quality materials. I don't want to use worse websites so you can have more imaginary internet points.
> It takes 1 second to downvote a low value comment.
Agreed, except I think that is the problem.
It takes ZERO seconds to not give points at all to a low-quality comment. And the site should take care readers see the comments with more points before those with fewer points.
> Don't like it use a different website.
I think you are saying nobody can or should criticize Stack Overflow and its cadre of super-super-users because nobody is forced to use it.
It's a bit like saying hey you asylum seeker we put you in a cell with standing-room only for weeks and separated you from your children and put your baby in a cage without anybody changing their diapers ever, but if you don't like that, seek asylum in a different country. You can't criticize us because it is you who came here.
I think allowing users to subtract points leads to a larger delta between good and bad content leading to a better differentiation and ranking of content insofar as voters are good judges. I think this is mathematically unassailable.
All that's left to discuss is strategies for maximizing the quality of votes and voters. Ex minimizing the impact of low quality voters by requiring rep to vote.
I think highly paid professionals whose wages mostly put them in the top 10% of the world have an easier time changing tech support forums, perhaps by opening a new tab, than the refugees fleeing murder and mayhem with nothing but the clothes on their backs have of picking a different country to land in.
> top 10% of the world have an easier time changing tech support forums
Surely. I was just saying it is a "little bit like" that. The principle seems to be the same: You can't criticize because ... you chose to use Stack Overflow for help. Go elsewhere if you don't like it.
Surely that is what people who don't like it do. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't express their opinions about it.
> 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.
A few ideas to make it harder to ask dumb questions:
I believe that rebellious '-1 downvote' comments will be far fewer than the actual downvote so original idea seems better. In fact such rebellious comments should be deleted/flagged in case they don't provide any additional reasoning behind downvotes similar to what happens on HN.
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, ...]).
>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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.