Timeline for Proper reasons to downvote a question?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 24, 2010 at 20:50 | vote | accept | Justin L. | ||
| Jun 24, 2010 at 20:50 | comment | added | Justin L. | The initial poorly formatted revision was understandable, in my opinion. But you make good points about maintaining a quality of useful questions for the internets as a whole. Thank you. | |
| Jun 24, 2010 at 20:38 | comment | added | Grace Note StaffMod | For the two examples you used - the first one can easily be explained as a residual vote from the initial, poorly formatted revision of the question. Not everyone has edit privileges, you get downvote ability a full 1900 reputation earlier. The second one can be explained as a downvote for the dangerous nature of implying that cross domain requests should be allowed. It's just an implication but if a user feels that this is dangerous that user is fully entitled to downvote on that reasoning. Third one, I couldn't tell you myself. | |
| Jun 24, 2010 at 20:31 | comment | added | Grace Note StaffMod | @Justin The goal of Stack Overflow is not to be a repository for every piece of junk out there that people want to post. We're here to "make the internet a better place", and a good start is making sure that good quality questions are being asked. Downvoting poor quality questions is a perfect measure to work towards this goal. That isn't to say every question with a downvote is poor quality - but that poor quality questions have good reason to be downvoted. | |
| Jun 24, 2010 at 20:19 | comment | added | Justin L. | I understand upvoting useful questions. But at the same time it feels iffy to impose that a question's purpose is to be useful, and if it doesn't fulfil that purpose, it should be downvoted. | |
| Jun 24, 2010 at 20:13 | comment | added | Grace Note StaffMod | @Justin Just because a question should be useful, it does not make all questions useful. Someone posting a rant about their code not working, for example, is not very useful. Likewise, the vote also kinda indicates that you yourself found it useful. I wouldn't upvote any random Ruby question because I don't use Ruby, so they aren't useful to me. I would leave it for the actual Ruby people to upvote it. | |
| Jun 24, 2010 at 20:11 | comment | added | Justin L. | I still don't understand why a question has to be useful; isn't that the job of the question? | |
| Jun 24, 2010 at 20:09 | comment | added | Grace Note StaffMod | @Justin Whether you vote for yourself or the community as a whole is entirely up to you, though usually these are interlocked. As for pointing out why, there is always the option to leave a comment explaining a downvote. | |
| Jun 24, 2010 at 20:06 | comment | added | Justin L. | I understand the reasons to downvote an answer; however, it feels intuitively weird do describe a question as "not useful". Useful to who? The community? The asker? (And if so, it'd be more useful to point out why the question is useless/promotes incorrect patterns of thought/has glaring vulnerabilities than to leave a downvote, especially an anonymous one) | |
| Jun 24, 2010 at 19:56 | history | answered | Grace NoteStaffMod | CC BY-SA 2.5 |