Should we reduce rep bonus for upvotes on posts with a negative score?

Question

This might sound a bit crazy, but hear me out...

There's a certain behavior among voters on SO that, while understandable, makes down-voting incorrect or unhelpful answers somewhat counter-productive: the sympathy up-vote.

Try this: watch new answers, and wait for one that's particularly useless to pop up. Make sure it isn't blatantly abusive or insulting - just completely unhelpful. Wait for a few minutes, to make sure it isn't improved by the author or a wandering editor. Note that it hasn't been up-voted.

Now, down-vote it... And wait to see how long it hangs around with a -1 score before someone up-votes it. It won't be long...

It seems there are many kind souls on SO who feel that any answer which is not blatantly offensive shouldn't be scarred by a negative score, and who will act to counter any votes that result in such a scenario. Nothing wrong with that, in and of itself - everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and so long as they don't up-vote to the point where it sorts ahead of other, correct and helpful answers, no harm done...

...except for the disparity in reputation taken from and then returned to the person who posted the answer. See, it turns out that posting benignly unhelpful answers is actually a pretty decent way to pick up a few rep points. Since it takes five down-votes to counter the rep bestowed by a single up-vote, snagging an early down-vote on your unhelpful answer will almost assuredly leave you with at least an eight-point bonus once all is said and done!

Indeed, if you were so inclined, you could garner a tidy reputation by merely being consistently fast, and only subtly wrong. It's better to be lucky than good...

That is a shame. So, I propose that, so long as the current vote score for a given post is less than 0, the rep bestowed upon the author for an up-vote should no more than match the rep taken from him for a down-vote.

One down-vote: -2, one up-vote: +2, net score for the post: 0, net score for the user: 0.

Of course, an up-vote followed by a down-vote would still result in a net +8 rep for the author. That's fine - i don't see anything wrong with the difference under normal circumstances.

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(reposted from UV, now that MSO is the official feedback site...)

Answer 1

It would be slightly more complex to engineer, but I've often thought I'd like to see rep bonuses and penalties as a bell curve, i.e. diminishing at extremes.

My thinking here is that it's not particularly fair that an simple answer on a high visibility subject can easily gain 20+ upvotes and be no more "correct" than a detailed, insightful, genius answer on something obscure which might get just 1 or 2 upvotes.

If it was my design, I'd allow a certain potential maximum rep change (plus or minus) for any question and weight the score around zero the heaviest so +10 might represent 90% of the potential value and +20 represents 100%. Attaching rep to the score of the question rather than the individual votes would also mean the overall view was important, and up and downvotes were commutative: +5 and -5 would give you 0 rep rather than 40 as it does now.

Answer 2

As you say, this is due to the discrepancy between the amount of rep lost for downvotes and gained for upvotes. I've never really understood this discrepancy - I would personally rather have downvotes make a difference of -10, possibly with a cost to the downvoter of -5 instead of -1. This may discourage more "frivolous" downvotes which don't achieve anything.

Personally I reserve downvoting for answers which are incorrect or significantly misleading - and in those cases it seems crazy for a single upvote to counter 5 downvotes. Surely we should have a more serious form of discouragement for potentially harmful answers. (Or alternatively, you could think of it as encouragement to delete an answer which you posted in good faith but turned out to be inaccurate.)

I guess I'd like to at least hear more discussion about why downvotes are so relatively powerless.

EDIT: Thinking about this more, I suspect that one of the problems is that rep is seen in multiple ways:

• A score in the "game"
• An indication of how much the system trusts you (should the system trust you more for posting an answer with +1 and -4 votes than if you hadn't posted it?)
• An indication of technical prowess / typing skills (even though it inaccurately measures these, it's still seen that way sometimes)

Having technical knowledge doesn't really mean that someone knows what's best for SO or has SO's best interests at heart - but we use it as a surrogate metric. It works pretty well most of the time, but it does make issues like this trickier to reason about.

Answer 3

This isn't about rep, at least in my mind. It's about encouraging the effort it takes to write a question that some third person will get value out of some future day. The idea of voting for questions is that the questions that have more usefulness will be voted up, and less will be voted down. If gaming, or sympathy voting, or martians, persistently upvote awful questions, then the goal is not achieved.

Answer 4

I understand your argument, Shog9. But doesn't this fine tuning make SO less understandable? We should consider giving new users not a hard time to understand the system. See also What's the single biggest barrier to entry on Stack Overflow?. Jon skeet's approach would help more, I think.

Answer 5

While the problem is well thought out, I'd be quite curious to see how true it is in practice. Honestly, getting upvotes for questions and answers (particularly questions) is not hard at all and I fail to see how someone could actually manage to get any sort of meaningful reputation out of "pity upvotes" - there are a LOT of much more powerful ways to game the system, this one just doesn't seem like a priority.

Answer 6

I don't think anything should be done. Simply put, rep is meaningless. It has no effect inside (except granting some extra abilities) and outside of the site. An up vote gives someone a nice feeling that what they are doing is appreciated, and a down vote with a small rep loss is an indicator to them that they may have made a mistake (and should go and fix it).

Essentially, gaining rep is what fuels users to the site. Getting more rep for an up vote provides a greater amount of positive feed back and encourages people to continue posting. The moment you increase the amount of rep lost for a down vote, the less people are going to post. You also have to remember that bad answers are punished swiftly and with great force (so a bad answer may get 6 down votes in quick succession). A 5 rep loss for active users (all those with over 10k raise your hands, I think I count at least 4 posts from people who fit that), isn't that much, but making a starting user lose 5 to 10 rep per down vote will quickly discourage that person to return. Essentially, this is all about rats pressing bars and you want them to press it as fast and as often as they can.

Even if answers are bad, you want to encourage people to post, because they will gently be moved to the bottom from negative votes. A person gaining 6 rep and losing 4 (1 up + 2 down) is little compared to that person posting a correct answer for someone else.

Answer 7

I suspect there would be unintended consequences of this change.

Let's say we implemented your change (namely, that upvotes to negatively voted posts don't grant extra rep). Knowing that

• a downvote is enough to deny anyone rep on a post
• upvotes no longer give "free" rep to negatively voted posts

I have to honestly say I would be more likely to engage in "pity" upvoting than I was before.

I wasn't a fan of the practice precisely because it gave away free (and potentially unearned) extra rep and thus indirectly devalued my own. With this change implemented, you'd have single-handledly created a system where casting "pity" upvotes can be handed out without a concern.

As the OP said:

makes down-voting incorrect or unhelpful answers somewhat counter-productive: the sympathy up-vote.

This change makes sympathy up-votes far more likely to occur, as no "free" rep is given out.. so why not upvote any mean old negative votes you see? What's the harm .. other than destroying all sort orders.