As I mentioned in chat, having some sort of quality control (aside from stuff like closing questions) is absolutely necessary for both questions and answers. I want to take a bit of a look at how the voting system is currently used on SE.
First off, upvotes. Upvotes are used on questions to indicate that this is a high-quality question. What that means depends on the person, the site, and the question:
- It can mean that this is a common question that will be useful for future visitors to the site.
- It can mean that this question does not have an easy-to-find answer and shows research effort on the part of the answer.
- It can mean that this is an interesting question and enjoyable for people on the site (such as an intellectual challenge for the answerers).
- It can mean that someone else had the same problem.
- etc.
Upvotes on answers also have different meanings,
- It can mean that this solution worked.
- It can mean that it provided a useful or in-depth explanation.
- It can mean that even if it didn’t solve the problem it gave useful information that was related to the question.
- etc.
And of course downvotes are used for a whole variety of different things as well. On questions…
- It can mean it was lazy and didn’t show any effort to solve the problem on their own.
- It can mean it is unclear and badly written.
- It can mean that it is an uninteresting question that doesn’t interest anyone in the community.
- It can mean that someone disagrees with the premise of the question.
- etc.
And answers…
- It can mean it didn’t actually solve the issue in the question.
- It was written unclearly and difficult to understand.
- It was unsourced or entirely speculation.
- It doesn’t actually answer the question (e.g. “me too”).
- etc.
So once we understand what the votes are being used for, and what the feedback the votes are trying to convey is, then we can look at what we want to do with these different types of feedback.
If someone is downvoting because the answer is flat-out wrong, then it doesn’t make much sense to, say, ask the OP to edit the answer. If it’s totally wrong, then editing won’t help; they’re better off deleting the thing and writing a new answer.
On the other hand, if someone is downvoting because the answer is unclear and is struggling to get the point across, then giving feedback to the OP that an edit would help has the potential to be useful. Telling the OP that their answer got feedback from two people that it needs to be edited to be clearer is more useful than just showing a score of -2 without any reason specified.
So I propose that we have a more nuanced feedback mechanism than just upvotes and downvotes. Someone should be able to select “needs editing, is unclear” as a downvote reason. That feedback is then transmitted back to the OP - “Someone has requested that you edit your answer to “Why do unicorns love daisies?” because it was unclear.”
And something similar for upvotes, although perhaps not transmitted back to the OP the same way. Someone viewing the answer should be able to see that seventeen people have upvoted as being a solution that works, three people have upvoted for being a great explanation, and one person has upvoted for being useful even though it didn’t address their specific issue.
(Side note: A default to “other” as a voting reason might be a good idea, if someone doesn’t want to specify a reason every time. It should probably be an option to select a voting reason, not a requirement (or if it is a requirement, “other” should be an option).)
Basically: A more nuanced voting system that allows people to mark why they are voting the way they are, that gives both the OP and people viewing the post an idea of what the issues / good things are with that post.