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I am proposing a new feature in Stack overflow where questions or comments with too many negative votes automatically be put on hold.

This is not a new feature and it is not an original idea. I have seen this feature on Youtube

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Now, if you see the comments are hidden from public view and not entirely removed.

So this is what i am proposing.

Questions & answers with 8 downvotes or more automatically be put on hold.

And the down votes should be a sum of upvotes and downvotes so 2 upvotes and 10 downvotes should still be put on hold.

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  • 6
    Now 7 more people downvote this so that this question can be placed on hold... ;) I think you get the idea.
    – Qantas 94 Heavy
    Oct 29, 2013 at 7:38
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    Answers with -3 or lower are already indicated by the lightened foreground, comments are second class citizens, and 5 close-votes is a better indication than 7 down-votes. (5 users with +3000 vs. 7 users with +125)
    – Dave Chen
    Oct 29, 2013 at 7:40
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    @MarsOne: what did I do this morning?
    – Qantas 94 Heavy
    Oct 29, 2013 at 7:43
  • @MarsOne Downvotes on meta could mean disagreement with the idea, not quality of the post. I didn't downvote you though :)
    – Dave Chen
    Oct 29, 2013 at 7:44
  • @DaveChen, Thanks for the explanation. But i still feel the idea is not totally bad. Yeah, maybe it can deliberated over a bit. My main concern is that questions which are really low quality stay on the site far too long
    – MarsOne
    Oct 29, 2013 at 7:46
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    Are you saying we should aspire to the moderation standards of Youtube comments?
    – Carl Veazey
    Oct 29, 2013 at 7:59
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    Yep, comparing with YouTube was not really a good idea... Maybe you should propose them to adopt our standards ;)
    – brasofilo
    Oct 29, 2013 at 10:04

2 Answers 2

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Questions with enough downvotes are already automatically hidden from the front page without being closed. If you want to compare this to YouTube, notice that hidden comments can still be replied to, so in the same way we shouldn't be closing questions to new answers just because they've been heavily downvoted.

Answers cannot be closed or put on hold, so your feature request makes no sense for answers. Unless you mean closed to new comments, in which case, posts always accept comments unless locked or deleted, and likewise again comments on YouTube are always open to replies unless deleted.

Just getting this in before the question gets closed for having too many downvotes.

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This is what are close votes for. If someone thinks question should be closed, he/she can use that close vote. I downvote questions which I want to close only of the questions is really really bad. Otherwise, I don't waste regular votes on such questions. I prefer to spare them to reward someone for giving a good answer or asking a good question (or reserve for downvoting something really bad).

That what you propose is the duplication of already existing functionality, encouraging to use the regular votes in the other way as they are designed to.

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