Would the downvoter be visible to moderators/review members? Otherwise I fear reversing targetted voting would be rather difficult.
I can imagine the following things:
- a dev-only, access-logged feature showing who voted on this post
- a mod/review board-feature showing vote-matches between users (who voted often for another user) together with some relative overlap strength.
If we have the idea of community moderators (who do not have PII access) and instance admins (who have PII access on all sites and can have stuff escalated to them by community moderators), we can give access to the votes to the admins and they can investigate those cases when needed. That’s kind of like SE, where only (certain?) CMs can see and invalidate votes.
I know votes aren’t PII, but they’re sensitive info so let’s restrict the access to those we’re already trusting with sensitive info, at least to start.
1 Like
For the purpose of figuring out what users from different brackets of expertise in the area (judged by their reputation in the tags I’ve attached to my question) is, I think the following way of viewing votes could shed more light on whose votes count more and whose should weigh less in my opinion.
Imagine you could open up a breakdown of votes by brackets of rep within each tag like this:
How to create an instance of a class knowing its name in a string, using reflection?
[c#] [reflection]
Post votes breakdown by rep in [c#]:
0 … 50 rep +2 −7 − don't count towards total score and not visible except here
51 … 500 rep +2 −1
501 … 2500 rep +4 −1
2500 … 10k rep +2 −2
10k … ∞ rep +1 −0
Post votes breakdown by rep in [reflection]:
0 … 50 rep +2 −7 − don't count towards total score and not visible except here
51 … 500 rep +1 −1
501 … 2500 rep +1 −0
2500 … 10k rep +0 −0
10k … ∞ rep +0 −0
This would tell me that users who don’t seem to know (according to their user activity on site, we don’t know their actual level of expertise in every area, but this is what we have to work with) much about [c#] or [reflection] account for the most downvotes, and users who know something about [c#] account for the majority of upvotes. This would give me confidence in my post.
————————————————————————————
As for whether/when to display votes from low rep users and how much it costs…
I think everyone (with a registered account) should be able to vote immediately, and those of us who want to see those votes should be able to.
Votes from users who have 0 rep (or unregistered users) should not be immediately visible to others until they register and earn some basic lower threshold of 50 rep, at which point their previous votes become visible to others and start counting towards total post score.
I think showing a non-intrusive message “How can OP improve the post? Care to leave a suggestion?” should be the cost of a downvote, and to make it actionable, don’t limit users to comments only (which can be a hassle to come up with) but also allow one-click reaction icons/descriptions/text votes which could be added to the post instead of text comments. These reactions could be an alternative to canned comments, and contain something like:
- Asked and answered many times before (aka “show your research” but you strongly suspect OP probably didn’t even do a simple search) − this is one of the most common reasons why a post may gain a downvote, andin this case I would recommend changing how users vote by not downvoting but leaving this exact “reaction” as a way for OP to know that their question isn’t “bad” per se, just that it’s not valuable to have it asked here for the 100th time;
- Badly formatted − wall of text, code not in code block, excessive markdown usage;
- Citations needed / authoritative references needed − for when OP says “everyone knows that X” and it’s actually not something widely known;
Also, a couple other reactions to illustrate how else this system can be used:
- Illustrations could be a great addition − this isn’t a “downvote” scenario exactly, but I think it’s a useful to have quick “reaction” for when you don’t want to write a comment with essentially the same meaning;
- Outdated answer − this is unlikely to help anyone in present day, but could have been useful at the time of posting;
Downvoting is not abuse. Closing questions is not abuse either. Both are vital curation mechanisms.
Oh boy no. Oh no. Please spend 5 minutes in the review queues on SO. Years on Stack Exchange have taught me that there is such a thing as a stupid question.
Besides, there are many practical issues with requiring comments for downvotes, which have been discussed to death on Meta Stack Exchange. In particular:
- If the explanation of my downvote is “read any of the other answers on this question”, why should I bother?
- If someone else has already written a comment that explains the reason for my downvote, why should I repeat that comment?
- If I leave a comment like “this answer is not useful”, then I haven’t provided any information whatsoever. So what was the point of the whole exercise?
3 Likes
This is blaming the victim. It also incentivizes users to not explain their downvotes. Both are bad for the site.
You must not forget that the site must be friendly to the experts providing the good content. Put yourself into the position of someone like that. You downvote when you see bad content, but also explain why. That results in a few revenge downvotes that you can’t see, can’t rebut, and the mods can’t see either. Most people end up refraining from explaining their downvotes. I explain mine anyway, and have gotten a lot of (seemingly) revenge downvotes as a result.
Think about how this feels. Anyone with minimal rep can declare something you wrote as being bad, but you can’t face your accuser or even find out what they think is wrong. You don’t know what to fix or explain why you think it is right.
The current system sucks. This was one contributing factor to my curtailing activity on SE a year ago. I still have the highest rep on the Electrical Engineering site, even after a year of inactivity. I occasionally look without logging in, and I noticed that downvotes on my post pretty much stopped as soon as I stopped posting, while upvotes on my existing posts continued. This is strong evidence that most downvotes were short-term revenge reactions to something else I did. That’s just plain wrong.
Yes, and having all votes in the open makes this much easier to judge.
But this encourages everyone to NOT explain their downvotes. Start from a different premise. Suppose most people did the right thing and explained their downvotes. Now how do you protect those people from petty revengers? That’s what we really should be focusing on.
4 Likes
I like the general idea, but 10% rep for a single downvote seems too stiff a penalty.
While I generally like the idea of rewarding people for explaining their downvotes, I’m not sure how to make the mechanics work. What keeps someone from simply typing “lkjsd jlksj dfklj sdlkj ytiu yoij we lm” as the reason? How would the system detect fraud of #2 looking like #1?
Good downvotes should be encouraged, as you are trying to do with #1 and #2.
Now consider the likely quality of anonymous versus signed downvotes. Those willing to publicly stand behind their downvotes are much more likely to have a good reason for them.
Some people here argue that disallowing anonymous downvotes will reduce downvotes, and thereby reduce an important feedback mechanism. But, consider the quality of such lost votes. These votes are cast because:
- Not really sure, doesn't want to look like a fool for being wrong.
- Revenge for downvote or close elsewhere.
- Doesn't want to spend the time explaining.
- Afraid of revenge for disagreeing.
Properly addressing the problem of revenge downvotes eliminates #4. #2 is clearly something we don’t want. That leaves #1 and #3. Some of those might be legitimate, but how much weight do you really want to give those compared to the expert that explains what is wrong and puts their reputation behind their conviction?
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