Discourage "downvote and move on"

[Lundin]

@Olin

However, that requires a cadre of users who are willing to work with the OPs of bad questions. I don’t see that happening

At SO we had whole armies of these kind of people. Or at least some 50 to 100 people - who did nothing else but curating the site. They almost didn’t contribute to the actual content, but just kept the site clean. There was the “SO close vote review” chat which was all about moderating the site, very active. There were numerous bot projects that resulted in very good clean-up and/or notification bots.

Finding people willing to do this won’t be a problem. The problem is rather, how well does that amount of dedicated moderators/veteran users scale with the size of the site? SO is pretty damn big. At smaller communities, these tasks are mostly just carried out by diamond mods alone. So if implementing some system with “question quarantine”, we would have to ensure that the number of moderators/privileged users scale with the amount of questions ending up there.

[Lundin]

@dmckee

For every would be question poster who just needs a little guidance, there are two who don’t yet have the foundational skills to recognize the difference between their proposed version of a question and the “grown up” version. For every new user who can take advice and run with it to accomplish more learning than was contained in your comments there are two who will doggedly insist that the experts haven’t given their ideas proper consideration.

You make some good points here, this is very true in my experience. Turning these diverse kinds of problematic people into productive contributors might not be an easy task, mission impossible in some cases. The thing is, if the question is put in “quarantine”, they have the option to either listen and (perhaps reluctantly) improve, or have the question deleted. They are forced to make an effort to receive answers. But we will not be able to save 100% of the questions.

One important aspect of this is to ensure that people arrive to the site with correct expectations. They have to realize that it is not a “forum”, that it is not “do my homework for me”. And whatever other important rules that the specific community wish to enforce. The scope of the site must be made clear to everyone before they ask a question - they shouldn’t need to dig through some help library to find this, it should pop up in their face when they ask a question, at least for the first time. This is also where “ask a question wizards” could be useful.

[raphaelschmitz]

Re: that idea of hiding questions, seems like SE The Company is doing what you want:

Questions that get voted to be closed will be hidden, giving authors the opportunity to improve their questions in private.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/02/25/sharing-our-first-quarter-2020-community-roadmap/

[Lundin]

@raphaelschmitz

Re: that idea of hiding questions, seems like SE The Company is doing what you want:

Maybe they read this forum to grab the good ideas from here then. I proposed this system the first time at Jan 27th here: How to introduce newcomers successfully? - #28 by Lundin

[santana]

No matter how much rationale you put on downvoting, a negative voting on a question or answer, feels like a slap in the face for new users.

Here is an idea (it has probably been proposed before, but here it is anyway): when voting on a item goes negative, hide the damn number, or show it only to moderators.

A negative number sitting on a question or answer is good for the system to know how to sort or filter content, but we humans do not need to know the actual number, all we need to know is whether the content must be improved, deleted, or answered properly.

[cellio]

We’re going to show upvote and downvote numbers, not just the former minus the latter. “+5 / -1” still conveys that five people thought it was good. This won’t do anything to soothe the sting for posts that have only downvotes, granted.

We’re showing the raw votes so that controversy is more visible. +15/-5 and +10/-0 mean different things, but both would show as 10 on SE.

(Also, the scoring we use for answer ranking isn’t strict uv-dv; it takes controversy into account.)

[klutt]

@cellio

We’re showing the raw votes so that controversy is more visible. +15/-5 and +10/-0 mean different things, but both would show as 10 on SE.

I think that can be a very good thing. I often use the downvotes as an indicator if I should watch out and read comments carefully.

[Lundin]

@santana

No matter how much rationale you put on downvoting, a negative voting on a question or answer, feels like a slap in the face for new users.

Here is an idea (it has probably been proposed before, but here it is anyway): when voting on a item goes negative, hide the damn number, or show it only to moderators.

Either you use public shaming as your self-moderation policy or you don’t. The down vote shaming to discourage bad content only works if there is actual down votes displayed. We know from 10 years of SO that it works somewhat OK quality control-wise, but we also know that it creates a nasty reputation for the site. If “Stack Overflow 2” is what we are building and we don’t care about welcoming/site reputation, then that’s definitely the way to go.

Whereas a system where bad posts are simply moved away from the main site swiftly and all feedback & corrections are carried out in private, both sets a higher quality standard than current SO and comes across as more welcoming at the same time. It also minimizers veteran user or mod burnouts, when people get sick of seeing the same old crap day in day out. With a system where 1 trusted user can immediately remove the post to a private quarantine, only 1 such user needs to see it. And only those who actually care about helping confused users can go dig through this quarantine.

Down votes would still have a place, but then only for the purpose of “this is technically incorrect” etc, not for the purpose of “your whole question is a mess and can’t be answered”.