Allow an edit to notify downvoters: "I think I've fixed the issue now - please check"

Question

To me, a downvote usually indicates a problem with an answer. When I downvote it's to mark the answer as having a problem, not the person. If the answer is fixed, I want to remove that downvote - but it's tricky to keep track of all the questions I've looked at over the last few hours.

I don't actually downvote very much, but it's very easy to forget what's going on.

It would be nice to have some way of indicating in an edit that you (the editor/answerer) believe the reason for the downvote has now been resolved, so that the downvoters could come and undo their downvotes or explain why it's still not fixed.

(Note: this isn't about rep-recovery, but quality control. I would feel a lot better about downvoting on "iffy" answers if I felt it was likely that the answer would be fixed and I could undo the vote. Whether or not I'd get back the cost of the downvote is somewhat immaterial.)

Answer 1

I totally agree with Ólafur Waage's idea:

Or you could have a passive listing in your recent history area where you can see a recent list of edited questions of things you have "upvoted", "downvoted", "commented"

I'd only extend it to add in that listing all new comments on questions where you've commented. Now is a bit of a pain to have comment threads in an answer, having to review recent list and go check if there's anything new on it.

Answer 2

I'd notify the downvoter any time a downvoted question is updated or commented, without any option from downvoter to turn it off, except lifting their downvote or the answer being deleted.

Downvoting, in my opinion, should imply more responsibility than just losing a point of rep and forgetting.

Usually, if an answer is irrecoverably bad, it keeps being downvoted until the answerer gets the message and deletes his answer, which is not a problem.

But if there is heavy activity or heavy discussion on the answer, there certainly is something about it, which should force a downvoter to keep an eye on the question.

A couple of updates from the comments:

• Individual sites can opt in or out (this was posted when only Stack Overflow was around)
• It make sense to notify the downvoters only if the score goes up compared to what it was at the time of the downvote
• A debounce interval of a week or so can be added ("ok, it's still bad, but I'll ping you again in a week if the post keeps getting action")

Answer 3

Similar in principle, though lighter-weight, than dasblinkenlight's suggestion would be to have the downvotes section on one's own profile have a simple indicator when a post has been edited since the vote action.

Then those people who care about responding to edits by withdrawing their downvotes have an easy place to check; and people who don't care don't get any new UI to distract them.

Mockup (sorry, the stars aren't freehand...) of what my page ( https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/151211/aakashm?tab=votes&sort=downvote, but only I can see that) might look like:

Answer 4

It kind of seems that the people have spoken here:

330 up vs. 15 down at the moment, not to mention the 4 bounties. It looks like this is a pretty popular idea, and has been for some time now.

I know this isn't a democracy, but if user input is really valued give it a shot.

Answer 5

I like the idea, but I am wondering about the implementation.

You could have one of two things (just brainstorming here):

• An editor changes the question / answer and checks a field called something like "Notable improvement".
• This sends a notification (either via the top bar or the envelope) to all downvoters (and possibly even all the commenters and other editors).

Or you could have a passive listing in your recent history area where you can see a recent list of edited questions of things you have "upvoted", "downvoted", and "commented"

(Upvoted also since you could change your mind if the essence of the question could change over time and you no longer agree with the current state of it.)

Answer 6

I would enjoy this. I too apply temporary down-votes until solutions are cleaned up/corrected. This would be a great feature.

Answer 7

I would go further, and create a queue of everything that I have downvoted that has since been edited. The queue would look and behave similar to the queue of reviews, but it would be private.

The queue should let me walk through questions and answers that I downvoted, display the cumulative edits applied since the moment of my downvote, and give me three buttons - Keep the downvote, Remove the downvote, and Vote up.

Answer 8

With the User Profile having so much in it now, it would be a simple matter to add an edited-downvote section to the Votes tab, like so:

If we were to have a general notification of edits after downvotes, I'd put a time limit on it, like three days. I don't want my whole history notifying me of any edit like that.

Answer 9

I've long suggested this kind of thing in a more generic sense. Basically my idea (now a stagnant UserVoice ticket) is that your recent activity view should include:

• Answers to your questions
• Comments on your answers or questions;
• Edits to content you've downvoted; and
• Any activity in a question you've favourited.

Of which this is one example. Basically, the current mechanism is a little too crude for a good workflow. The point of a downvote should be to improve an answer but the UI doesn't help you at all in this regard. You have to somehow keep track of downvotes (yes, I know there’s a votes view) given and manually check them for modification. It should be easier than that.

Answer 10

I like this idea too as it should help improve the site. If posters see a reclamation of rep after fixing a post then it makes them a) more likely to do it in the future and b) more aware of what a good post looks like.

The only drawback is that it could lead to a lot of notifications and if we send users too many notifications then they could start not only ignoring these, but other ones as well.

A better solution might be to have a tab on your profile - only visible to you - of posts edited since you voted on them (both up and down) where you can check the edits and review your vote.

Answer 11

I think AakashM's suggestion makes sense, and apparently would be easy to implement - I would only add one aspect.

Part of the reason I see this as an important feature request is because downvoting is an important service and responsibility that users have, and we would want to make it as easy as possible to use effectively. Burdening users with one more responsibility resulting from their responsible downvoting is one more impediment to being willing to exercise this responsibility.

Notifiying users every time a post was edited would perhaps be overwhelming. But, with the indication sitting in their "votes" tabs, never notifying them would impose upon them the task of occasionally sorting through every downvote they ever cast to see if it was edited.

Perhaps a friendly middle ground could be to implement as suggested in animuson's comment (displaying the already extant locked/unlocked status of votes), but to add an intermittent notification to the inbox that just says

You have recently unlocked votes

and clicking on the notification would take you to your votes page. The notification could be sent at UTC midnight each day where it was relevant. This would give users active notification without cluttering their inbox.

The system already differentiates between upvotes and downvotes, so this could be implemented in such a way to apply only to downvotes. And in order to not need to sift through the entire list, the recent changes could be highlighted in the same way that the reputation page of the profile highlights those items which are new since the last time you visited that page.

People who aren't interested in following up on their downvotes could follow a very simple method - click the red inbox, and then click anywhere else on the page, and *poof* the notifications will go away! Magic! This won't force anyone to follow up on their downvotes - it will just give them notice that there is what to follow up on, and they can feel free to ignore it, just like anything else that shows up in their inbox.

(A shortcoming of this approach - it would only notify the first time that a post was edited, at which point the vote becomes unlocked. If the post was edited again, it wouldn't register because the vote status wasn't changed. If anyone has a workaround to this, please leave a note.)

Answer 12

There is now a "follow" feature, which can be used on the close-voter/down-voter side to follow a question and get notified about edits to it. It's not quite what was suggested here, but it's probably the best workaround for now.

Answer 13

I think this is a great idea, but it would eventually get out of control. I currently have given over 150 downvotes, and received a few (not too many of course =P) As the system gets larger and larger, they're going to be sending out more and more edit updates.

But, I think this idea could work if you added a checkbox somewhere on the post itself (question or answer) that allowed you to say "Send me updates when this is edited".

That way, you could downvote it (comment why you did so) and check the box. When the OP edits the answer, you could go back and upvote them (if their change was satisfactory). But, if you become overrun with 'edited' updates, then you can simply uncheck the box.

This is similar to this question

What level of notification should we have regarding questions we have posted comments on?

and my answer was almost identical.

But a little caveat on both. There could also be something in your preferences that says "Notify me if any downvoted answers are edited" and then it would 'autocheck' that box when you downvote something.

Answer 14

Another idea: Posters (starting at low reputation) could get a Review pane to review their own activity from some time ago, both for their downvotes and their comments.

The rules for what goes into that personal review queue could include comments/downvotes on posts that have changed since (and other rules as well, such as suggesting self-delete of "Thank you" comments).

Answer 15

Perhaps this could be incorporated together with getting notifications for new comments on posts (either questions or answers) that you've marked as as "interesting".

So, when you want to track a post (perhaps because you downvoted it, commented on it, or for any other reason):

1. You would request to get notifications about updates (tick a box or something)
2. When the post is edited, or a follow-up comment on it is posted, you'll be notified (via the envelope & Recent Activity page)

A bit like what devinb commented here, but using the same UI for keeping up with any activity (both edits and comments) on a post.

Granted, this would not be as fine-grained as some might want (e.g. you'd be notified also about new comments even if you were only interested in an edit that fixes the problem in an answer). But on the bright side, this would largely solve both this FR and the comment-tracking one, without cluttering the UI with too many options.

Answer 16

It should be restated that the mechanism of downvotes at present can, in certain cases, have a negative impact on the overall quality of the site. Specifically on Philosophy SE, where there are lesser numbers of users, some of the concerns with edit notification may not apply. Also Philosophy SE, and possibly other SE's, there is a slightly different flavor to questions and answers. Philosophy has a nascent element of debate which can be partially catered for by empowering downvoters to review edits, while allowing PSE to keep to the general question - answer paradigm.

Enabling edit notification for downvotes will greatly improve content on Philosophy SE

So I propose that, if not for SE as a whole, then at least give individual communities the option to enable edit notification.

Also if anonymity is a concern: When a downvote is cast enable an option to comment anonymously to that content.

see also: Should downvotes have explanations?

Answer 17

I think this would be a cool feature people can earn by increasing their reputation.

1. It would be a special type of down vote people who have a certain amount of reputation points get.
2. When used it will send a message (with details on what needs to be fixed) to the person being downvoted.
3. When the downvoted person addresses the problem they can respond with a button click indicating the problem is resolved.
4. The person who originally downvoted can then either give more feedback or mark their issue as resolved.

Both users can have a Badge that has a notification counter (right along with the others in the top right e.g. Recent Achievements). This will let the user know when they have a resolvable downvote (on their question/answer) or when someone request the user to resolve a downvote they cast.

Answer 18

I believe that the change to the vote change time limit would make this unworkable. Unless the fix is done immediately, you won't be able to change your vote. Since the vote time limit change was shortened to prevent gaming, it's unlikely to be changed. If it were extended, the changes to random sort ordering would have to be rolled back as well as that is one of the main complaints against it -- the ability to down vote to increase your relative visibility and then come back later to recover your rep points after your answer has been upvoted.

Answer 19

This feature would be even more useful for questions. I had a question which was strongly downvoted, so I tried to improve it by editing, unfortunately nobody will ever see this edits, as questions below certain score do not appear in the active feed. So at least if the downvoters would see the edit they could change their mind.

Answer 20

At the risk of igniting a flame war (and/or downvotes without discussion about how to take an idea and make it better to solve the problem) about removing anonymous, uncommented downvotes...

Make downvotes a separate item, either as a section or in-line with comments (which would preserve the time-order). Make them attributable to the downvoter and require a comment of a given length.

Then provide people the ability to concur the downvote. The downvote and the concurrences would count as the existing downvote count. This might still allow anonymous downvoting via concurrences, but the problem is identified, can be responded to, and can later be marked as fixed, eliminating the downvote cast.

Likely, marking a downvote fixed would require a certain reputation. This would also allow one person to sweepingly remove someone else's downvote and all concurrences.

This has many upsides. Perhaps some newbie garners several downvotes with concurrences causing a substantial downvote count. Before they even check this, reviewers fix some of the original downvotes. They return to find the corrections in place and only the now appropriate remaining downvotes. They fix them. Someone acknowledges this and marks the downvotes fixed. Now the voting is where it is now appropriate to the current state.

If a downvote states a reason, such as, "Poster did not research subject," when someone notes that research has been done, why shouldn't they be able to reflect that? The objective is good questions and good answers. This allows a policy where people can edit other people's posts. If my post isn't exclusively locked to me, why should a criticism (which should be appropriate) that has been appropriately addressed?

Right now, if you have the reputation you can downvote anything you don't like without comment or attribution. This is considered by many to be a virtue. It is not at all. There is no debate. There is no discussion. There is no appeal. There is no ability to fix. And the reason need not be supported by the rules. If you don't like it, that is good enough to downvote -- no one will know.

The poster's question is about asking someone to revisit their downvote. If they don't want to, no amount of tweaking this system to "help" will change that. So I propose that the community should be able to address it. The first response is, "They can, by upvoting." But that is false. Upvotes are for "good", not "problem fixed." These are not at all the same thing. You should not vote "good" for "fixed."

As to the same issue with upvoting... I have no problem at all requiring attribution and comments to upvotes. People won't like that it takes longer. Sure a popup with pick your reason including "I want to know the answer" or "Very well prepared" or a field to free type would be fine by me.

But, this eliminates the free fire-and-forget anonymous, uncommented downvote...

Answer 21

While this is a good idea, I think @name comment notifications gets us close enough to this.

In other words, if someone leaves a comment about why your post is wrong, you can now reply to them and they'll be notified.

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/01/new-improved-comments-with-reply/

I think it's a bit of a lost cause to expect or anticipate downvoters who didn't leave a comment, to come back and change their vote.