(Up)Voting on Low-Quality Posts in Review tasks

Question

I've searched and have seen similar questions, which are often marked as duplicates and point one to Why is voting removed from the new review system. In the accepted answer from said thread, it says voting was re-enabled for first posts and late answers, but it's still not available for low-quality posts.

I can see some reasoning for not wanting to allow downvotes:

• Don't want to completely discourage users by having them get flooded with downvotes
• Give people time to actually edit their posts before burying them in downvotes
• Additionally, it suffices to simply recommend deletion

However, I can't think of any reason that we shouldn't be able to upvote them.

NB: I understand that we can open the post in a new tab; nonetheless, that is not a good reason for saying that we shouldn't have an upvote button.

Answer 1

Primarily, I think the reason voting is excluded is the purpose of the queue is not about post quality or technical merit, but fitness for the site, which does not require voting.

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But from your comment on Sam I Am's post:

I get what you're saying, but just because upvoting isn't necessary doesn't mean that we shouldn't have it readily available, IMO. So long as it didn't lead to confusion or cluttering or in some way lowering the quality of reviews, I don't see why it shouldn't be there. I don't know.

I think you are missing something though. By including voting, it might cause unintended side effects. The problem as I see it, is that you are giving an unfair advantage to short (but good) posts that get trapped by the filter as you are going to get more eyes on it. So someone could theoretically get more upvotes for just posting something that ends up in the filter than another user who writes a better answer for the same question. By making you click through to upvote, you can at least survey ALL answers on a question and evaluate them fairly.

You could probably make the same argument for the other review queues as well, and while I can see that side of the argument, I think there are subtitle differences:

• First Posts - generally a single user is only going to be in the first posts queue once and it only takes 1 positive review to kick it out of the queue so you won't have too many extra eyes on it. Additionally the whole purpose of the First Posts queue is to judge quality and technical merit, and upvotes (and downvotes) are how we do that here

• Late Answers - Just like First Posts, the whole purpose of the queue is to judge quality and technical merit. And since the post is on an old question, it could probably need the extra views to give it a fair chance.

Answer 2

From my answer to the question you linked to:

A concern with allowing voting in the Low Quality queue specifically is that you're not viewing answers in the context of other answers, or a question in the context of its answers. You're never able to vote in these circumstances normally - it's worth remembering that voting directly from the list of questions was considered early on, and discarded as too likely to produce bad results.

Our experience with voting in the context of First Posts and Late Answers backs this up - indeed, we had to impose strict restrictions on the number of reviews per post and add a review option that kinda breaks the review in order to keep vote skewing from being a problem.

Philosophically, the purpose of each review task is to ask the reviewer to answer a specific question: "does this thing require special handling?" where special is determined by the nature of thing and the reason for it being in the queue to start with. Low Quality posts are posts that might need to be deleted for the good of the site - this is a serious question with serious consequences and therefore we need some human oversight to make sure it is treated appropriately. The question of whether or not something requires upvotes is separate from this, and adds complexity without any real advantages.

Answer 3

It's always seemed to me that the purpose of the low-quality-posts queue was to automatically detect and remove low quality posts.

Since you have the problem of helpful posts potentially getting caught by the automatic quality detection, you have real people go over them to decide the quality.

Voting on the post is unnecessary in order to accomplish this.

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First-post/Late answer queues are different. The purpose of those queues is just to get people to look over the post and interact with it. They're very open-ended, so you can do almost anything you can do at the actual post.

Isn't there a link to the question itself where you can down-vote it if you want to?