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).
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.
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.
In other words, give them a placebo button: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button
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.
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.
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?
An SO down-vote is not simply an "opinion", it affects your karma-score, perhaps even your chances of getting hired.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't like it use a different website.
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.
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.
Perhaps pick a less disgusting comparison.
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.
A few ideas to make it harder to ask dumb questions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861911
In short: when accounts are free, activate instantly and can ask questions immediately, don't be surprised that people ask stupid questions.
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.
[1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
[2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-preven...
[3] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-peo...
[4] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/250177/require-a-co...