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As I'm sure you all know, downvotes "cost" 1 reputation. That is, every time you downvote:

-2 to post owner
-1 to you

This is done to make sure downvotes are cast only when you feel strongly that something is incorrect / wrong / dangerous / of low quality.

We've been tweaking a few things to increase overall voting, particularly on questions -- read all about it on the blog entry Vote For This Question or The Kitten Gets It.

These tweaks appear to be working. We're seeing good initial results; here's a graph of question votes (just question votes) across SO, SU, and SF over the last 60 days.

(for question and answer votes together, see these graphs.)

Edit by Jon: Jeff sent me the source data, so here are the upvote/downvote ratio graphs I asked for. The high peaks are artifacts due to low traffic volumes/insufficient data (there were zero question downvotes on SF on a few days).

Now, when I said "increase voting", I meant in both directions, up and down. I feel downvoting on questions is particularly useful to distinguish a well-written, researched, clear and useful question from .. well, a question that is none of those things.

Thus, to incentivize more balanced question voting, we are considering removing the -1 cost of casting a downvote on a question.

That is, downvoting a question -- and only a question -- would now be

-2 to post owner
no cost to you

Your thoughts?

As I'm sure you all know, downvotes "cost" 1 reputation. That is, every time you downvote:

-2 to post owner
-1 to you

This is done to make sure downvotes are cast only when you feel strongly that something is incorrect / wrong / dangerous / of low quality.

We've been tweaking a few things to increase overall voting, particularly on questions -- read all about it on the blog entry Vote For This Question or The Kitten Gets It.

These tweaks appear to be working. We're seeing good initial results; here's a graph of question votes (just question votes) across SO, SU, and SF over the last 60 days.

(for question and answer votes together, see these graphs.)

Edit by Jon: Jeff sent me the source data, so here are the upvote/downvote ratio graphs I asked for. The high peaks are artifacts due to low traffic volumes/insufficient data (there were zero question downvotes on SF on a few days).

Now, when I said "increase voting", I meant in both directions, up and down. I feel downvoting on questions is particularly useful to distinguish a well-written, researched, clear and useful question from .. well, a question that is none of those things.

Thus, to incentivize more balanced question voting, we are considering removing the -1 cost of casting a downvote on a question.

That is, downvoting a question -- and only a question -- would now be

-2 to post owner
no cost to you

Your thoughts?