Please exercise your votes

Question

At the expense of becoming public enemy number one, I have decided to post a grumpy post. (It was rather grumpy when I first posted it, I hope it reads better now.)

This is hardly a new call to action, but the last time we had a meta discussion on this topic was quite long ago.

Overview

Votes are the primary mechanism by which the quality of questions and answers are established. Every day, we have 40 votes to use. However, even the most prolific of voters on here barely use one-fifth of their available daily votes (SEDE query).^1,2

Downvotes

I feel that, in general, we give out too many upvotes and too few downvotes.³ One can also see this in the query results. (I must say that I am not sure if the results include votes on deleted posts. If it does not, then I would expect the up/down ratio to be severely skewed towards upvotes, as it is right now.)

However, that is not my impression of the front page. A lot of things that arguably deserve downvotes get passed over and ignored, hovering around a neutral score of 0.⁴ Closing a question, or deleting an answer, often takes several hours since we do not have a lot of people here. Downvotes would help to clearly signify that such questions are not welcome here.

I hope that we do not refrain from downvoting merely because we are afraid of hurting somebody's feelings. Downvotes are not something that you or I should be ashamed of, especially if the content is objectively bad. Examples include: entirely wrong answers; one-liner or otherwise poorly substantiated answers; zero-effort HW questions. I would also like to point out that downvoting questions costs no rep and downvoting answers that eventually get deleted also costs no rep.

I have removed the paragraph that used to be here, because I do not want to specify or dictate what should or should not be downvoted. That is something that everybody has to decide individually. However, the point still remains: we as a community need to judge post quality more.

But downvotes are rude and not nice!

If you feel that a question has potential room for improvement, then please leave a comment saying whatever you feel is relevant. It doesn't have to be a really long essay, even a short comment gives people some feedback and sometimes it does lead to the question being improved via editing. This meta post may help as well.

Upvotes

With that said, not all content is bad. Every day I also see good questions that only reach a max of +2 or so. Please do upvote good questions by new users (there are many of them). As a bonus, it also motivates us to write good answers to them. Here's an example of a good question.

I think that, as a first rule of thumb, if you could envision a question receiving a good answer, then it is worth upvoting. Of course it is more nuanced than that, but I feel that that is a good starting point. And if a question already has a good answer that you upvoted, do upvote the question as well! If you think the question can be further improved, edit it! Our entire purpose is to create and curate good, quality content. I know I ranted about downvotes signifying bad content, but we also need upvotes to signify good content, and not only on high-rep users' questions/answers.

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Footnotes

¹ For those who don't understand the SEDE syntax (like me before this afternoon), this query lists the top 100 Chem.SE users by their votes per day. Only users who 1) were active in the last 30 days, and 2) have 100 or more total votes, are counted. This is to get rid of outliers, for example, someone who registered yesterday and voted 5 times.

² I know that this is an inherently flawed query. It does not account for periods of time where people are away from the site, amongst other factors, and I wanted to try to construct a query for votes in the last 30 days, and I'm sure that would show higher voting rates, but I believe SEDE doesn't allow me to pull vote times, so this is the best I can do.

³ I am not trying to call out any particular user or their voting pattern, so please do not take it that way. I am glad that there is lots of content that we upvote, but we just shouldn't ignore the rest.

⁴ Some even inexplicably get upvotes.

Answer 1

As a longtime sporadic SE lurker, it didn't even occur to me that voting could affect the page until I read this post.

Seriously. I've been on the Stack Exchanges for a little over 3 years now, and I have always viewed it as asking questions and writing answers. The upvotes/downvotes just came as part of doing a good/crappy job on those activities. Of course, now that I think about it, it makes perfect sense that voting on questions/answers is another way to participate---it just never struck me as such before.

So I guess one question is how can we impress on new users (and I suppose existing ones) that voting is also a form of contribution to the exchange?

(As a side note, I also never realized that downvoting questions costs no rep. If you'll forgive me, I'm going to go on a spree later this week...)

Answer 2

I personally try to avoid downvoting new users. In addition, I think the reputation that is needed for some "privileges" are somewhat silly. I personally dislike the fact that you need a certain reputation to comment. I understand that there is chat, but I would prefer to take my time and reply to the asker/answerer instead of setting aside who knows how much time for the chat. Unfortunately, most questions come from new users. Unless it is clear that the new user is just here for homework questions, I do not downvote. I try not to downvote unless the user has more than 100 of reputation. Sort of like a grace period to get used to the website.

The problem with helpful comments is that they aren't anonymous. Maybe we could implement an anonymous comment system?

Answer 3

Downvoting is a thing which often misused.

You have to realize that a lot of persons have no idea what they are doing. Even some of the successful ones are lacking in certain areas. The reason they are succeeding is that there are very few people out there who do know what they are doing (in all areas), meaning there is essentially no competition. You get the picture. So sometimes, downvoting is just mean of protection "my" territory from invaders. The more unsafe person feels about his high status, more aggressive he protects his territory.

Lets look on that from a different angle. Example from my practice. I am an experienced software developer. The last thing I questioned in my domain of expertise was "eval" function. It was a very good question of expert level. Concept "eval" is just like concept "downvoting", it is considered to be bad practice to use in the most cases. Most participant of that branch just reacted on the keyword "eval" downvoting it, same as jellyfish reacts on light, didn't even try to understand how valuable my question was. That's how most software developers are learned to act in their professional life, simple condition -> simple reaction. Not too intelligent behavior.

Another side of the problem. We have to admit that for many people downvoting is just a way for self-affirmation and negative emotions sink. Everybody experience in his/her life negative emotions time to time. It's the fact. People who cant find the healthy output for their negative emotions, for example, sport, use the Internet for the purpose. And a level of intelligence does not matter in this case.

I explained 3 reasons why downvoting is often misused. I believe open-minded community ( if it is so ) should protect their newcomers from negative emotion and passive aggressiveness of residents and downvote only if question violates the rules abruptly. If you think a question is stupid, please, pass on. If you think you are too intelligent to answer so trivial question, please, leave it. Let others give an answer.

Don't expect new users to know all the rules — they don't. And be patient while they learn. If you're here for help, make it as easy as possible for others to help you. Everyone here is volunteering, and no one responds well to demands for help.

In gamification theory, the first emotions user experience entering into a system determine a lot. It is the most important moment of user engagement. Single downvote could kill newcomer's internal desire to ask questions here for the lifetime. Did you get my point?