The association bonus should not enable users to vote on every site

Question

The number of upvotes for a question is a flawed measure of question quality, one particular issue is that the amount of exposure a question gets matters a lot. Questions that were linked in the hot questions list tend to get an enormous amount of votes, much more than any questions gets organically on the site itself.

The kind of question that tend to get to the top spot of the hot questions list tend to be simpler, less technical questions with an appeal to a broader audience. The hot questions list distorts the voting even beyond the mere effect the increased views have. It exposes the question to users that might be interested in reading about that topic, but are not active users on the site and wouldn't have seen and voted on the post otherwise.

I think this distortion of voting is harmful, as the result might not be representative of the community of that specific site. For example, while I might enjoy reading some answers on Security.SE, I'm by far not qualified to actually evaluate them. If I voted there, my votes would not provide any actual value as I can only judge the answers in a very superficial way. Another example would be Skeptics where the community requires answers to cite references supporting their claim. This works very well and the community also votes that way, but the moment a question hits the hot questions list, voting becomes unreliable and answer not meeting our standard are upvoted anyway.

I think that this interaction between the hot questions feature and the low barrier to voting on sites where one didn't earn any reputation at all leads to a distortion of voting and dilutes the usefulness of post scores.

My proposal would be to not count the association bonus for the voting privilege. This means that in order to vote a user would have to get at least one upvote on an answer, two upvotes on a question or five accepted suggested edits. I think that this barrier is low enough to barely inconvenience anyone with a serious interest in the site, and significant enough to prevent drive-by voting by non-experts from the greater SE network.

Answer 1

I don't think this is useful.

I support forcing reputation to be earned on a site before votes are granted on meta. But I don't want to have to re-earn privileges on every site I participate in before I can vote.

I realize that you're trying to solve a problem with regard to the hot questions list. But just in the normal course of searching and browsing I often find an answer to a question before I post on a site where I have an interest. If I cannot vote on that site because I have not participated there, I cannot reward the poster of the question and answer for solving my question before I had one.

If this privilege is removed we might as well remove the entire association bonus system and force all users to re-earn their privileges on any new site.

The minimum bar reputation privileges are there in order to get users to learn their way around SE's mechanics, once they've done that once it's really unnecessary to force them to go back to being completely new users on every new site.

Answer 2

Without data (requested here) it's rather difficult to tell how much of an issue this is, or what sites are affected.

• ^{Say, one may ponder that issues related to bonus don't have a noticeable impact at Stack Overflow, due to it being so much larger than all the rest of the SE network combined. But then again, without data this is merely a guess.}

Anyway, in order to tame the damage of drive-by votes in hot questions, I would consider more targeted approach.

I think the most straightforward way to prevent over-voting from newcomers who just arrived at the hot question would be to simply delay granting them upvote privilege for a day or two.

This approach follows one recommended in a seminal article by Clay Shirky (bold font in quote is mine):

my favorite pattern is from MetaFilter, which is: When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page. "Someone mentions us in the press and how great we are? Bye!" That's a way of raising the bar, that's creating a threshold of participation. And anyone who bookmarks that page and says "You know, I really want to be in there; maybe I'll go back later," that's the kind of user MeFi wants to have.

Particular advantage of "delayed approach" is that it allows to address concerns of the newcomers in a non-confrontational way: If you really want to vote on that post, simply wait a day or two and get back to it to cast the vote.

Another option, also compatible with Shirky's guidance, would be to require particular citizenship level (if this feature is implemented) in addition to association bonus to grant upvote privilege.

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Don't get me wrong, local reputation requirement feels fair to me and I would probably even prefer it to above, but it looks quite difficult to justify. For example, I really can not imagine how to address concern like this:

Hey I've got over 1K... 3K... 10K rep at 2... 3... 5... Stack Exchange sites, how am I less qualified to vote than a random guy who just happened to get two occasional upvotes on their single answer?

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Another consideration to take into account is that setting "hard" requirement to gain on-site reputation prior to voting privilege may have a side effect of incentivizing abuse. I've seen something like this once at Programmers, in a hot question that was protected - which essentially models a requirement to gain on-site reputation prior to doing something.

User who arrived from another site just quickly posted 3 low quality answers to different questions, two of which picked quick sympathy upvotes and, before their answers were flagged and removed, they were able to break through and post into protected question.

Imagining tricks like this becoming a regular practice instead of isolated incident sends shivers down my spine.

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_{Side note current way looks particularly ugly in the context of protected questions. Fundamental approach at Stack Exchange is that it's easier to contribute content than to rate (vote) it, and this makes good sense: one obtains a privilege to rate posts after proving their will and ability to contribute positively rated content. The way how association bonus works in protected questions totally trashes this reasoning: system doesn't yet trust user enough to allow them contribute content but somehow grants them the privilege to rate it. Weird, isn't it.}

Answer 3

A stray vote or two here and there doesn't really do much damage, and if someone found the answer to his question because somebody else already asked it, we want him to be able to upvote the question and perhaps some of the answers. SE has declined blanket restrictions on voting before, and I can understand that.

But I don't think you need a blanket restriction to solve the problem you describe here. The problem arises when a question is hot, or has just been Reddited, or gets tweeted by someone with a gazillion followers, and people swoop in and the ones with association bonuses vote. That seems to be the issue that really concerns people when talk of modifying voting comes up.

Some have proposed restricting voting on currently-hot questions, but that's problematic too (and I think was declined). The Hot Network Questions list is ever-changing and this would involve extra computation; further, does the problem really go away if it stopped being hot an hour ago, or yesterday, but you came across it anyway? It also doesn't help with other sources of publicity. No, what you want is for voting restrictions to depend on some durable property of the question.

Like protection.

Protection already restricts privileges that would otherwise be available: you can't answer a protected question unless you have at least 10 rep locally. It seems reasonable to me to extend the effects of protection to voting, at least on answers. (I actually think voting on questions is different; you don't need to be an expert to be able to say "I had this problem too". But that's a detail.)

If a community has protected a question, it's probably because the question has been getting unwanted attention in the form of junk answers. Drive-by upvotes (where drive-by downvotes are not possible) is unwanted attention that seems to cause a similar level of disruption to the community. This wouldn't be hard to explain to people; the "need 10 local rep to do something" concept is already there.

It then becomes the community's decision alone whether any given question should be restricted in this way. It doesn't depend on a hot-questions algorithm or any other automated process. The people affected by the behavior get to decide.

Answer 4

What users from other site want is important but I think the main questions that we should answer are the following ones:

Is voting because of association bonus beneficial for a site or not? What does the site's community think about it?

After all a site is mainly for its community: users who actively participate on that site. I think this is far more important than what users from other sites might like to do. I think the decision whether users from other sites can vote because of association bonus should be decided mainly by each site's community.

In response to wax eagle's answer, I don't think we need to reward every useful resource on the Internet. If it is helpful for you that is great. But it doesn't mean you know what that particular site is about or even if the question is on-topic on it. Knowing about how SE software works does not imply we are familiar with what is considered on-topic or off-topic on another site. Take for example the famous batman question on MSE. I think the active users of MSE do not think it is a very good question. However, it is highly voted because of votes from users active on other SE sites. This can send a wrong message about what a site is really about. If we are not actively participating on a site do we have a right to define what that site is about? It seems to me we don't. And the batman question is not an exceptional case. Many questions with very high number of votes are like that: the site's community does not think that the question is good enough to represent their site. But because of votes by users from outside the community, those questions are on top of the list of highest voted questions (and answers).

SO has a significantly larger number of users and this can create a heavy bias in the votes for questions that attract lots of views from outside a site's community (e.g. when it is mentioned on HN) and this doesn't seem helpful for smaller sites who might agree what questions and answers should represents their site. (ps: it might make sense for the trilogy sites which share a large portion of their users but between sites where this is not true.).

On the other hand, I think the association makes sense for other privileges. I guess they are the main reason why association bounce was put in place. It doesn't make sense to forbid posting links because one has not earned enough reputation on a particular site yet. I have never seen people complain because they can't vote on another site. However, I have seen several times that people got frustrated because they were not allowed to post comments.

I don't know if it is viable to distinguish between reputation earned on a site from the association bonus but it seems to me that the software already supports this: a protected question can be answered only by those users who have earned reputation on that site. So it seems it should not be difficult to put something similar in place for voting.

Answer 5

You touched on something interesting here:

If I voted there, my votes would not provide any actual value as I can only judge the answers in a very superficial way.

It's difficult to discuss the premise in a matter-of-fact way, because it's not really possible to ascertain why someone voted on something the way that they did without outright asking them. However, I'd argue against the premise, because as far as I can tell people up-vote mostly for the following reasons:

1. They're acknowledging the technical accuracy of something because they know it to be correct
2. They learned something that they didn't know before
3. They were entertained, in some way, by reading the post

This only becomes undesirable when something is wrong, inordinately up-voted because of reason number 3, and now falsely sitting in the number 2 bracket. I can only think of one instance where this happened, and it was on Gaming when someone brought up extreme pig riding in Minecraft:

... yet the association bonus really can't take credit for the votes, people found it valuable because it made them feel good.

Yes, it happens. But I don't think it happens nearly enough for us to make the level for participating in a new community any higher than it currently is for our seasoned, trusted users.

Put differently, there's litter on every major street, but the majority of people hold onto their rubbish until they can find a suitable place to deposit it. Most people that earn this bonus accept that it's also a responsibility. I see a lot more harm than good coming from taking this away, even if the problem was significantly worse than it is right now.

Answer 6

The first thing that I can say is that the association bonus only allows UPvoting on a question on a site. There requirement for DOWNvoting is 125, greater than the association bonus. You need to have earned 24 rep on that site to downvote, even starting from 101.

I'm a member of many sites. There have been a number of times when I started by voting on a single hot question, and then returning to the site to become active.

One idea mentioned here that appears to have merit is the "time lag" proposal. Perhaps one shouldn't "associate" and be allowed to vote the same day. Maybe the same should apply to someone getting an upvote privilege the "natural" way. S/he shouldn't be allowed to vote on the first day on the site even after earning 25 "rep" if that happens; maybe only on the second day on the site.

Answer 7

Other people have mentioned "time lag" for voting. perhaps this could be achieved by the association bonus rep being fed in gradually, of a day or several days (e.g. at 4 rep per hour) This means drive by voters have to wait a few hours to vote.

Answer 8

What if only votes from active users of a site affected what was shown on the front page of the site? This would remove the problem of the “easy” question setting an example of what the site is about.

Also the system that chooses the “Hot Network Questions” should not take into account any activity a question gets when access var the “Hot Network Questions” list.