The biggest problem is downvoting.
Downvoting is toxic.
A better change would have been to make any downvote COST 10 points. Or at least 1 point or 2.
Downvoting is toxic.
A better change would have been to make any downvote COST 10 points. Or at least 1 point or 2.
Once you see a constant flood of "I made app, here my 1000 lines of code (screenshot), I get error, where bug?" that the moderators have to defend the site against - you might just change your opinion about the value of downvotes.
BUT on StackOverflow it is entirely normal, even expected, that you post a well thought out and reasoned question and its instantly downvoted because, well, who knows why? Drive-by downvoting is simply negative.
A different mechanism could be used for the sorts of issues you identify.
In my experience, that just doesn't happen. Most questions sit at a score of 0, and those which do receive votes are almost always upvoted. (The data supports this[1].) Questions rarely end up with a negative score, and when they do it's usually because there are obvious problems with their formatting or content. (Usually low effort, off topic, or an obvious duplicate.)
[1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1096887/q...
Would the new proposed mechanism require more volunteer work or the same effort as now?
Btw, many people forget that back in 2011, Jeff Atwood was concerned that there was too much crap and the community was not downvoting enough. Therefore, he removed the points penalty to encourage the community to aggressively downvote more:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
Hmm, not my experience, at all. Though I heard this more than once, so I see a couple of possible reasons (or combinations thereof):
- depends on the community/tag; I've mainly asked questions tagged with the languages starting with a C, some git stuff and some more obscure things
- depends on the poster's reputation points i.e. maybe there's a bias to not downvoting/closing questions asked by people with 10k+ points?
- the questions were not actually well thought out/reasoned even though you think they are
Any ideas?
My favorite is always when they dont get a response and then get angry at the community -- "i asked three days ago, STILL NO ANSWER, ANSWER NOW"
Then you ask them a question to get more specific info and they just reword the same info from the question again.
Cherry on the top is when someone new comes in the comments and they yet again ask the same thing, I loved that.
Let time, and lack of up votes, sink them? Have moderators hide them with a FRIENDLY "Hey, we've hidden your post because it doesn't meet 'these requirements', once you've edited, we'll review it and show it again." message. If they don't improve, keep it hidden, tell them to do better. If they still don't improve, delete it, and require any new questions they post to be moderated first. If another question ends up deleted, don't let them post any more.
Basically, give feedback in a positive manner with the goal of getting that person to do better. It may seem like more work, but I think it would be much more rewarding than what I've seen on Stack Overflow and other support forums.
From my experience - big part of new users asking questions do not even care if they get any upvotes or downvotes, or if someone is friendly. They don't even bother to accept/upvote the answer when it's given. They simply want to get their question answered and then move on, forget their username and create a new account for the new question next time.
A better system is surely possible. But my main message would be - please spend some time doing it all: 1) asking questions; 2) answering questions; 3) volunteering for moderation; before starting to think about how to change the site.
They don't tell the person what they did wrong. Its incredibly frustrating to get downvoted and not have any idea why. For example, here on HN, I generally couldn't care less about what my score is, but when I write something based on my personal experience (ie something completely subjective from my life) and I get downvoted (it has happened!), I find find that incredibly frustrating because I don't understand why someone found my experience worthy of a downvote.
I imagine its similar on SO. If you're new and don't yet know the finer points of the rules, getting downvoted without an explanation is a surefire way of turning that person off the site.
> please spend some time doing it all: 1) asking questions; 2) answering questions; 3) volunteering for moderation
I have. At least, I've done the review queue a ton of times.
Nothing is inherently wrong with them, but downvotes without an explanation are without value.
Make accounts cost something:
- limited number of invites per year for existing valuable members
- small payment
- hassle (send us a post card or something like that, a "proof of work for humans")
Stack Overflow seems to want:
1. asking to be frictionless even for complete strangers
2. yet to be taken seriously when they continue to complain that this is going on.
if it's really that bad of a question, why are there 20 answers for it?
of far greater concern are the outdated and incorrect answers with the coveted green check mark next to them.
one sees that green check mark and believes all manner of drivel written next to it.
To someone who has spent a ton of time answering questions, it means "this is not a well-written question and I do not have the time to explain to the poster why that is; I would rather spend my time on answering well-written questions, which is what I came to this site to do."
To a question asker, it means "you suck and I hate your question, and I'm not going to tell you why."
The problem is that there are a couple of mechanisms for getting rid of questions - downvoting, or flagging / voting to close. Some questions are clearly on the wrong site - just close them. Some questions are not good questions (screenshots of code, no explanation of desired behavior, no research done into error message) but they are not closeable according to the options provided. The downvote is just to send a message.
Answerers who downvote are people who genuinely want to help - they are spending their free time answering questions on the internet for no gain other than extremely localized imaginary internet points.
The solution is providing one method of feedback to the question poster, and couching it in a less negative way. Maybe all methods have the asker's feedback get hit, maybe none of them. Maybe the asker should be protected from feedback until they learn the site.
Asking technical questions properly is hard. I got downvoted and closed and duplicate questions on my first 5 attempts, and even my recent questions have 0-1 upvotes (my answers fare better, for whatever reason).
I think it's more accurate to say that answerers who downvote want to give answers (vs genuinely want to help). Because explaining to someone why their question is problematic is part of helping.
For the longest time everyone on the site believed it to be the "database" model. And helping individual users with their questions is not part of it. Under this framework answerers who downvote are simply doing what they are expected to do - weeding out poor entries from the encyclopedia. And the person who asks a question has no right to expect an answer, as stated in their 2011 blog entry:
> We believe asking questions on our site is a privilege, not a right. [1]
However recently they seem to be moving away from that model and only time will tell what it morphs in to.
[1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
The database model has never seemed right to me, but I do think SO is making progress moving away from it. Ironically, I believe they will be better able to achieve the database goal once they let it be an emergent property of Q&A rather than grudgingly allowing Q&A to get the database.
> Downvoting is toxic.
I disagree. Ignoring SO's dubious classifications of what's on/off-topic. The last couple questions I've posted have been shit-shows of off-topic comments and answers.
If you ask a hard question, a lot of people seem to only want to uselessly question what you're doing then answer a different, easier question. Those are totally worthless, and force me to waste a lot of time writing really defensive questions that try to nip the derails in the bud.
Honestly, SO should have some feature where the asker can just delete responses as off-topic.
> A better change would have been to make any downvote COST 10 points. Or at least 1 point or 2.
IIRC, it already costs 1 karma point to downvote an answer. I would guess it's the same for a question.
- https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down - https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
For a great many tags, it seems like there is a sport to show that a question doesn't apply to a specific tag, that it is a duplicate, or that the user should be doing something a different way than what they are asking for. There seems to be so much effort put into deliberately not answering the question that trying to participate is truly deflating.
SO heavily encourages leaving constructive feedback rather than simply downvoting.
At the same time it's a great tool for assessing the quality of posts. It's the same reason HN allows downvotes.
However the dynamic of SO is different. Users are coming to the site to get help and solve problems, not to have open-ended discussions.
SO should have a grace period for new questions. No downvotes during the first 1-2 hours. Aside from being less discouraging for new users it would also mitigate cases of incorrect downvoting. A negative score is a signal to other users that a question is not worth consideration, and dissuades possible answerers from providing a solution.
Can you elaborate? It's difficult to agree or disagree since I can't tell what you have in mind. What does 'Toxic' mean to you in this context?
As small as it is, a down vote is a public action saying that the person posting what you are voting on has less value. At least that what they said has less value. That is never a fun experience, even if you have very thick skin.
Why do I downvote? I downvote when an answer is wrong or outdated.
That's the point of downvotes, to push incorrect or outdated answers to the bottom.
In polite society, when you reprimand someone publicly, you only do so when private discussions have failed.
I'd also argue using down votes for outdated information is very inefficient. Wouldn't it make sense to just have a "this is out dated" flag, and list how many people have used it? Then, the author of the answer could update their post and ask that the flag be cleared.
For wrong answers, I'd say a comment "this is wrong because" first, then something other than down voting.
I guess its just as much a signal to people looking for an answer as it is for the person who wrote the answer. At least with a downvoted answer, its easy to see "ok, maybe not this one" and you can check the comments to see why. Not that I'm a fan of downvoting, I think a flagging system would achieve the same thing while being more helpful to all involved than an opaque downvote.
I don't know about you, but I find when I'm on a poorly-moderated forum, it's just the same questions asked over and over again every day.
Do you really need to explain Search to every noob who you downvote?
(Note that I never look at new Stackoverflow questions. I always find the site through Google, because someone's always asked the question first. I do improve answers when needed.)