Weighted Down-Voting based on Reputation

Question

I've been having a perplexing issue with the down-voting feature on SO lately.

When somebody down-votes my answers, I'd really like to know something about the user who down-voted me. It's certainly not because I have a grudge against the other user. Quite the opposite, I'd like a little insight to if it's somebody who has a high reputation (and thus a little more weight when it comes to their opinions).

Obviously, there's no good way to show exactly which user down-voted an answer without starting a flame war. My only other reasonable thought was to weight the down-vote. It's quite simple in concept:

A User with a high reputation downvoting your answer = More points deducted

It could easily be done in steps based on Rep:

     1 - 5000 = -2 Rep
 5001 - 10000 = -3 Rep
10001 - 15000 = -4 Rep

...and so on. That way, when you see the decrease you at least know the range of the user that downvoted you and then can (theoretically) see if there's something seriously flawed in the answer (which requires fixing/deleting) or simply a user mis-understanding part of the answer.

I understand that this isn't perfect logic but, in my opinion, it's better than not knowing anything about who downvoted you (or why).

Answer 1

There are two disconnects here. One is that high reputation implies better downvoting. You can be knowledgeable on both the system of downvoting properly and the subject matter of a post without needing to have high reputation. Likewise, people with high reputation may not actually know the subject matter at hand, but they can still downvote for reasons like poorly formatted questions which are completely irrelevant to reputation. So adding weight is not a good idea.

The more egregious disconnect is the idea that high reputation users should have greater control on the reputation of other users. This would allow a small group of high reputation users to deal crushing blows to other users because of possibly minor effects. It greatly unbalances the system - just because one user had more reputation than another, I suddenly take a hefty -8 for that one downvote? Maybe the higher reputation user knows better and the downvote on the question is more useful, but that should not be any reason that the user suffers exponentially for it.

There simply is no real relation between how much reputation a user has, and the effect of downvotes. Maybe you might trust their voice more, but this is punishing the target of the downvote very seriously for unrelated reasons to their offense.

Answer 2

High rep doesn't necessarily equal the in-depth knowledge you need to answer a question, or judge an answer appropriately.

Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone potentially misreads an answer. Everyone has a bad day where they just feel like unleashing their fury on the first thing they see with even the slightest issue.

I'm not saying that all downvotes are invalid. Certainly, I would argue that the very vast majority of downvotes are totally legitimate.

But a system weighted entirely on rep isn't going to work. I could, for example, downvote a perl answer on Stack Overflow, and your system would ding that user 3 points. Yet, I know almost nothing of any weight about perl; my rep is all from C#/.NET and Objective-C/Cocoa.

Novel idea, interesting approach, but ultimately not in favor of it.

Trust me, if your answer has issues, you'll know because either someone will comment (eventually) on it, someone may edit it, or the answer will turn gray from being downvoted into oblivion. Ultimately, you have most of the feedback you need already.

Answer 3

(I just stumbled over this old question.) I like the idea behind the suggestion. More experienced users can be trusted more, and experience is measured by reputation here. Actually, the word reputation means: How much do people give on your opinion?

The reasons given here against the suggestion are poor: Yes, users could misuse their rep earned on subject A to downvote on subject B. But why should they? Their contribution shows they like the site and how it is working. There is no reason to believe this change would make them start downvoting on random subjects. Remember: they are even trusted to vote on closing questions of subject B! They would not do if they don't understand whether this is a real duplicate, for example.

Just let me add four suggestions to improve the idea:

1. The weight can't grow linear with the reputation; there are too many users around with extremely high reputation. Exponential reputation is more realistic: 100 rep gives the priviledge to downvote by 2 – 1000 rep lets you downvote by 4 – 10'000 rep downvote by 6 – 100'000 rep downvote by 8, for example.

2. Why only downvote? The same applies for upvotes: An experienced user can better judge, whether something is a real good question. Use the same multiplicator for upvotes.

3. Make it an option: Instead of always using the full voting multiplicator, allow high-rep users to vote two, three or four times. This allows me to only give a normal vote for subject B, but vote three times when I'm highly convinced of my judgement. Side effects: (a) downvoting multiple times will increase the downvoting costs and (b) they need to rework those ugly new voting buttons to indicate the number of my votes.

4. Exclude meta sites from this system. Voting is different there and should remain democratic: one person, one vote.

With these changes, I think this will improve voting and thus user experience. Still, I don't think it's important enough to get a high priority.